SAA-C03 Design Cost-Optimized Architectures Practice Question
A production log archive 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
Test-takers frequently confuse Savings Plans with Reserved Instances, assuming that any commitment requires locking into a specific instance family, but Compute Savings Plans explicitly provide family flexibility while still delivering a significant discount.
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
The Compute Savings Plan (C) offers the largest discount (up to 66%) in exchange for a commitment to a consistent amount of compute usage (measured in $/hour) for a 1- or 3-year term, while still allowing flexibility across instance families, sizes, OS, tenancy, and regions. This matches the predictable three-year workload and the requirement for instance-family flexibility without 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.
- ✗
S3 Intelligent-Tiering
Why it's wrong here
S3 Intelligent-Tiering is an object storage class that automatically moves data between access tiers based on changing usage patterns to lower storage costs. It does not affect EC2 compute billing at all, so it cannot reduce the hourly cost of a continuously running archive-processing EC2 instance. Any savings it provides would apply only if the long-term logs themselves are stored in S3, not to the compute that produces or processes them.
- ✗
Dedicated Instances
Why it's wrong here
Dedicated Instances run on hardware dedicated to a single AWS customer, which addresses strict licensing or compliance requirements but adds an extra per-instance charge. They are billed at a higher rate than standard On-Demand and provide no commitment-based discount for consistent utilization. Since the question asks how to reduce spend on a continuously running production server, dedicated hardware is a cost-increasing choice, not a cost-optimizing one.
- ✓
Compute Savings Plan
Why this is correct
A Compute Savings Plan commits a specific hourly dollar amount for a one- or three-year term in exchange for up to 72% savings over On-Demand, and it automatically applies to any EC2 instance family, size, OS, or Region, plus Fargate and Lambda. A continuously running production log archive is a steady, predictable workload, so committing to a Compute Savings Plan locks in lower unit costs while preserving the flexibility to resize or change instance types later. This makes it the most suitable option for reducing EC2 spend on an always-on baseline.
- ✗
Spot Instances only
Why it's wrong here
Spot Instances are up to 90% cheaper, but AWS can reclaim that capacity with only a two-minute warning when EC2 needs the resources back. A production log archive that must run continuously cannot tolerate these interruptions, because logs would stop being collected and processed. Spot should be reserved for fault-tolerant or batch workloads, so relying solely on Spot would violate the availability requirement rather than optimize cost.
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 |
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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.