SAA-C03 Design Cost-Optimized Architectures Practice Question
A company has several AWS accounts and wants to take advantage of Savings Plans to reduce their overall compute spend. They have a mix of EC2 instances, AWS Lambda, and AWS Fargate across multiple regions. Which Savings Plan type will provide the most flexibility and cover all these services?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often select EC2 Instance Savings Plans. These only cover EC2 usage and will fail to provide the required coverage for Lambda and Fargate, leading to incomplete cost optimization.
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
✓
Compute Savings Plans
Compute Savings Plans offer the greatest flexibility, providing up to 66% savings compared to On-Demand prices. They apply automatically to EC2 instance usage regardless of instance family, size, AZ, region, OS, or tenancy, and uniquely, they also cover AWS Fargate and AWS Lambda, making them ideal for modern, heterogeneous architectures.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
EC2 Instance Savings Plans
Why it's wrong here
EC2 Instance Savings Plans provide the highest savings (up to 72%) but are restricted to a specific instance family in a specific region. Most importantly, they do not cover AWS Fargate or AWS Lambda, making them unsuitable for a company looking for a broad, multi-service cost optimization strategy.
- ✓
Compute Savings Plans
Why this is correct
Compute Savings Plans are the most flexible option. They apply to usage across EC2 (any family, any region), Fargate, and Lambda. This flexibility allows the company to change their compute technology or move workloads between regions while still benefiting from the discounted rates, ensuring long-term cost optimization.
- ✗
SageMaker Savings Plans
Why it's wrong here
SageMaker Savings Plans are specifically designed to reduce costs for Amazon SageMaker machine learning instances. They do not apply to general EC2 instances, Lambda functions, or Fargate containers. Using this plan would not address the company's primary compute spend for its application architecture.
- ✗
Regional Reserved Instances
Why it's wrong here
Reserved Instances (RIs) are an older commitment model. While Regional RIs provide some flexibility with instance sizes within a family, they do not cover Lambda or Fargate. Savings Plans have largely superseded RIs for compute because they offer similar discounts with significantly less management complexity and more flexibility.
Quick reference
Cloud Service Model Comparison
| Model | You Manage | Provider Manages | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| IaaS | OS, runtime, apps, data | Hardware, hypervisor, networking | EC2, Azure VMs, GCP Compute Engine |
| PaaS | Apps and data | OS, runtime, middleware, hardware | Elastic Beanstalk, Azure App Service |
| SaaS | Data and settings only | Everything else | Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Workday |
| FaaS / Serverless | Function code only | Infra, scaling, runtime | Lambda, Azure Functions, Cloud Run |
| CaaS | Containers and apps | Kubernetes, OS, hardware | EKS, AKS, GKE |
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every SAA-C03 question from scratch — 149 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Amazon Web Services exam blueprint
This SAA-C03 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 SAA-C03 exam.