SAA-C03 Design Cost-Optimized Architectures Practice Question
A production internal reporting portal runs continuously on EC2 with predictable usage for the next three years. The team wants a discount while retaining some instance-family flexibility. What should they buy? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse Savings Plans with Reserved Instances, assuming they require instance-family lock-in, or they incorrectly apply storage services (S3 Intelligent-Tiering) to compute 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 Plan
Compute Savings Plans offer the lowest prices on EC2 instance usage (up to 66% off On-Demand) in exchange for a 1- or 3-year commitment, while allowing flexibility across instance families, sizes, OS, and regions. This matches the requirement for a discount on predictable, continuous usage without locking into a specific instance type, and requires no custom scripts.
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 only
Why it's wrong here
Spot Instances are a cost-effective choice for fault-tolerant and flexible workloads, but they are interruptible: AWS can reclaim the capacity with a two-minute warning when demand spikes. A continuously running internal reporting portal cannot tolerate such interruptions without risking downtime and incomplete reports. Therefore, relying on Spot Instances alone would fail to provide the always-on availability required for production, making it an incorrect cost optimization strategy.
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Dedicated Instances
Why it's wrong here
Dedicated Instances provide physical isolation on a per-host basis, which may satisfy compliance or licensing requirements but comes at a premium price compared to standard On-Demand instances. They do not inherently reduce compute spend; instead, they often increase costs because you pay for hardware dedication. For a question focused on optimizing cost for a continuous workload, Dedicated Instances address a different concern—hardware isolation—not billing discounts, so they are not the right answer.
- ✓
Compute Savings Plan
Why this is correct
A Compute Savings Plan offers significant discounted rates in exchange for a commitment to a consistent amount of compute usage (e.g., $/hour) over a 1- or 3-year term. It automatically covers any EC2 instance family, size, or Region, as well as Fargate and Lambda, providing flexibility if the reporting portal's instance mix changes over time. This makes it the ideal solution for a continuously running production workload because it delivers up to a 66% discount versus On-Demand without locking you into specific instance specs.
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S3 Intelligent-Tiering
Why it's wrong here
S3 Intelligent-Tiering is an object storage class designed to optimize storage costs by automatically moving data between access tiers based on changing patterns. It does not affect compute spending or EC2 instance usage in any way, so it cannot reduce the cost of running the reporting portal's servers. Even though the name includes 'Intelligent', applying it to this scenario would be a category error: it addresses storage, not compute, and thus is irrelevant for this cost-optimization question.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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