MLA-C01 ML Model Development Practice Question
A machine learning engineer needs to reduce costs when training a large model on SageMaker. They are willing to accept potential interruptions and have checkpointing enabled. Which instance purchasing option should they use?
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
✓
Spot instances
Spot instances offer significant cost savings (up to 60-90%) compared to on-demand, but can be reclaimed by AWS with a 2-minute notice. Checkpointing allows resuming training from the last saved state, making spot instances suitable.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Spot instances
Why this is correct
Spot instances exploit unused EC2 capacity at steep discounts, satisfying the cost-reduction constraint. Because the engineer accepts interruptions and checkpointing is enabled, training resumes from the last saved state after a two-minute interruption notice. This suits fault-tolerant workloads, unlike On-Demand or Reserved instances, which guarantee capacity at higher prices.
- ✗
Reserved instances
Why it's wrong here
Reserved instances are a billing discount for steady, predictable workloads and carry no interruption mechanism, so they cannot be reclaimed mid-training. Spot instances suit this scenario: they are interruptible and checkpointing lets training resume, which is exactly the stated trade-off.
- ✗
Dedicated hosts
Why it's wrong here
Dedicated hosts reserve physical servers for licensing and compliance needs, billed hourly regardless of interruption tolerance, so they cannot deliver the spot-style discount the scenario requires. They are tempting when you must control socket-level licensing or meet regulatory isolation, but here checkpointing already signals that Spot instances are the intended answer.
- ✗
On-demand instances
Why it's wrong here
On-demand instances bill at full hourly rates with no interruption risk, so they fail the cost-reduction requirement despite being reliable for production training. They are tempting because they need no checkpointing and suit workloads that cannot tolerate interruption, but the stem explicitly accepts interruptions and has checkpointing enabled, which points to Spot.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This MLA-C01 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 MLA-C01 exam.