SAA-C03 Design Cost-Optimized Architectures Practice Question
A company is using Amazon EBS volumes for their EC2 instances. The current volumes are General Purpose SSD (gp2). The company wants to reduce costs without losing performance, and in some cases, they need more control over IOPS without increasing storage size. Which TWO steps should they take?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates might mistakenly choose io2 (Option B) because it offers high performance, but it is significantly more expensive than gp3 and does not meet the requirement to reduce costs.
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
✓
Migrate from gp2 volumes to gp3 volumes.
Amazon EBS gp3 volumes offer a 20% lower price per GB than gp2 volumes. Additionally, gp3 allows you to provision IOPS and throughput independently of storage capacity. This means you no longer have to 'over-provision' disk space just to get higher performance, leading to significant cost savings for IO-intensive workloads.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Migrate from gp2 volumes to gp3 volumes.
Why this is correct
Moving from gp2 to gp3 is a direct cost-saving measure as gp3 is priced 20% lower per GB. It provides a baseline performance of 3,000 IOPS and 125 MB/s for free, regardless of volume size, which often meets or exceeds the performance of small gp2 volumes at a lower price.
- ✗
Use Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2) for all volumes.
Why it's wrong here
Provisioned IOPS (io2) volumes are the most expensive EBS volume type. They are designed for critical, high-performance applications that require consistent sub-millisecond latency. Using io2 for general workloads would drastically increase costs compared to gp2 or gp3, contradicting the goal of cost optimization.
- ✓
Independently provision IOPS and throughput using gp3.
Why this is correct
One of the primary cost-saving features of gp3 is the ability to provision performance (IOPS and MB/s) separately from storage. With gp2, you had to increase the volume size to get more IOPS. gp3 allows you to keep a small, cheap volume while paying only for the specific performance you need.
- ✗
Convert the EBS volumes to Cold HDD (sc1).
Why it's wrong here
Cold HDD (sc1) is the lowest-cost EBS volume type, but it is backed by magnetic drives and intended for large, sequential, infrequent workloads. It has much lower performance than SSDs. Converting general-purpose application volumes to sc1 would likely result in severe performance degradation and application failure.
- ✗
Take frequent snapshots of gp2 volumes and delete the originals.
Why it's wrong here
Snapshots are stored in S3 and incur storage costs. Deleting the original volume and recreating it from a snapshot would not save money; in fact, the operational complexity and the costs associated with snapshot storage and volume creation could potentially increase the total cost of ownership.
About these practice questions
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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.