SAA-C03 Design Cost-Optimized Architectures Practice Question
A dev sandbox runs for several hours each night and can be interrupted and restarted. Which EC2 purchasing option should minimize cost?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse 'interruptible' with 'unreliable' and choose On-Demand for stability, missing that Spot Instances are explicitly designed for fault-tolerant, non-critical workloads like a nightly dev sandbox.
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 can be interrupted and restarted, making them ideal for fault-tolerant workloads like a nightly dev sandbox. They offer significant cost savings (up to 90% off On-Demand) because they use spare AWS EC2 capacity, which aligns perfectly with the scenario's tolerance for interruption.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
On-Demand Instances only
Why it's wrong here
On-Demand instances provide full compute capacity with no commitment, but they charge the full list price for every hour regardless of workload tolerance for interruption. Since this dev sandbox can tolerate being stopped, paying the standard rate means overspending on capacity that Spot could provide at a significant discount. The flexibility of On-Demand is irrelevant when the workload is inherently interruptible.
- ✓
Spot Instances
Why this is correct
Spot Instances offer spare AWS compute capacity at discounts of up to 90% compared to On-Demand, and they can be reclaimed by AWS with a two-minute warning when capacity is needed elsewhere. Because the dev sandbox runs only at night and can be interrupted without negative impact, it is an ideal fit for Spot. The main risk is interruption, but that is acceptable for this use case.
- ✗
Dedicated Hosts
Why it's wrong here
Dedicated Hosts provide a physical server fully dedicated to your use, primarily to satisfy server-bound software licensing or compliance requirements. They are significantly more expensive than On-Demand because you pay for the entire host regardless of instance usage. Using Dedicated Hosts for a nightly dev sandbox would incur exorbitant costs without any relevant licensing benefit.
- ✗
Provisioned IOPS volumes
Why it's wrong here
Provisioned IOPS volumes are an EBS storage configuration that guarantees a specific level of I/O performance, and they have no effect on the hourly compute price of EC2 instances. This option confuses storage performance with compute purchasing flexibility, and it would not reduce the cost of running the dev sandbox. The question is about compute purchase model, not disk performance.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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.