A startup is running a pilot application on AWS and wants to control costs strictly. The finance team sets a monthly budget of $1,000. They need to receive an email notification when actual or forecasted spending reaches 80% of the budget. Additionally, if the budget is exceeded, they want to automatically stop a non-critical Amazon EC2 instance to prevent further cost overruns. Which combination of AWS services should they use to meet all these requirements with minimal operational overhead?

AWS Cost Explorer with Amazon SNS notifications to send alerts at 80% spending, and an AWS Lambda function to stop the EC2 instance

AWS Cost Explorer provides cost visualization and forecasting but does not natively trigger alerts or actions. While you could build a custom solution with SNS and Lambda, this requires additional integration and is not the simplest managed approach. AWS Budgets natively supports both alerts and automated budget actions.

AWS Budgets with a budget alert set at 80% of the $1,000 limit, and an AWS Trusted Advisor check to stop the instance when costs exceed the budget

AWS Budgets can send email alerts, but Trusted Advisor provides best-practice recommendations only; it cannot automatically stop an EC2 instance. Budget actions (available within AWS Budgets) are needed for automated responses.

Amazon CloudWatch cost metric alarms combined with AWS Auto Scaling to reduce instance capacity when spending exceeds the budget

CloudWatch does not provide billing metrics by default; cost metric alarms are not available in CloudWatch. Also, Auto Scaling adjusts capacity based on demand, not directly on cost spending. This combination cannot reliably enforce a dollar-based cost limit or stop a specific instance.

What does this CLF-C02 question test?

Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.

What is the correct answer to this question?

The correct answer is: AWS Budgets with a budget action configured to stop the EC2 instance when the budget limit is exceeded — AWS Budgets allows you to set cost budgets and receive alerts when actual or forecasted costs exceed thresholds. AWS Budgets also supports budget actions that can automatically respond to budget alerts, such as applying an IAM policy or stopping an EC2 instance via a Lambda function or Systems Manager action. This provides a fully managed, automated cost control mechanism. Option A only provides visibility but no automatic action. Option B describes budgets with SNS alerts but does not mention the automatic action capability available through budget actions. Option D provides recommendations but no automated enforcement.

What should I do if I get this CLF-C02 question wrong?

Then try more questions from the same exam bank and focus on understanding why the wrong options are tempting.