CLF-C02 Billing, Pricing, and Support Practice Question
A company uses multiple AWS accounts managed under AWS Organizations. Which service allows them to share Reserved Instance discounts and Savings Plans across all accounts in the organization?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse AWS Cost Explorer or AWS Budgets with cost management features that actually share discounts, but only consolidated billing within AWS Organizations provides the aggregation needed for discount sharing.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
AWS Organizations with consolidated billing
AWS Organizations with consolidated billing enables you to aggregate usage across all member accounts, allowing Reserved Instance (RI) discounts and Savings Plans to be shared. This means that unused capacity from one account can be applied to reduce costs in another account within the same organization, maximizing overall savings.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
AWS Cost Explorer
Why it's wrong here
AWS Cost Explorer provides interactive dashboards and charts to visualize historical and projected cost and usage data. It is a read-only analytics tool that lets you filter, group, and forecast costs, but it has no ability to configure how billing or discounts are applied across accounts. Viewing effective costs after discounts in Cost Explorer does not mean the tool enables discount sharing, which requires an underlying billing structure.
- ✗
AWS Budgets
Why it's wrong here
AWS Budgets is a cost governance feature that alerts you when usage or cost exceeds thresholds you define, and it can also take actions like applying IAM policies or stopping instances. However, budgets are monitoring and notification mechanisms only; they do not change the billing relationship between accounts. Creating a budget across accounts presumes an existing consolidated setup but does not itself enable sharing of reserved instance or savings plan discounts.
- ✓
AWS Organizations with consolidated billing
Why this is correct
AWS Organizations with consolidated billing automatically rolls up all member account usage into a single management account bill, and the consolidated billing feature shares reserved instance and Savings Plans discounts across all member accounts by default. This pooling of discounts maximizes utilization because unused capacity from one account can offset usage in another. The management account can optionally disable sharing for specific accounts, but by default the sharing is enabled, making this the correct choice.
- ✗
AWS Cost and Usage Report
Why it's wrong here
AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) is a granular billing export delivered to Amazon S3, containing line items for every usage and cost across your accounts. While it can show the financial impact after savings plans or reserved instances are applied, it is purely a reporting mechanism. CUR cannot alter billing relationships or enable discount sharing; it only records what has already been charged.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CLF-C02 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CLF-C02 exam.