SAA-C03 Design Cost-Optimized Architectures Practice Question
A risk simulation workload uses CloudWatch Logs heavily. Retaining all debug logs forever is increasing costs. What should be configured? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse cost optimization features (like retention policies) with monitoring or compliance tools (like AWS Config or detailed monitoring), assuming that any AWS service that 'monitors' can also reduce log storage 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
✓
CloudWatch Logs retention policies per log group
CloudWatch Logs retention policies allow you to set per-log-group expiration rules (e.g., 30 days, 90 days) to automatically delete old log events, directly reducing storage costs without custom scripts. Since the workload uses CloudWatch Logs heavily and retains debug logs forever, configuring a retention policy on each log group is the simplest, most cost-effective solution that requires no operational overhead.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
CloudWatch Logs retention policies per log group
Why this is correct
By default, CloudWatch Logs retains log events indefinitely, so a risk simulation workload generating heavy log volume will accumulate storage costs without limit. Configuring a retention policy per log group—such as 30 or 90 days—automatically expires and deletes log events after the specified period, controlling costs and meeting data lifecycle requirements. This is the correct, direct way to manage log storage for CloudWatch Logs.
- ✗
AWS Config aggregation
Why it's wrong here
AWS Config aggregation is a feature for collecting configuration, compliance, and resource state history from multiple accounts and Regions into a central aggregator. It deals with configuration items and compliance rules, not with the contents or lifecycle of CloudWatch Logs. Aggregation does not influence how long log events are stored, so it cannot reduce costs from heavy log usage.
- ✗
CloudWatch detailed monitoring on all instances
Why it's wrong here
CloudWatch detailed monitoring on all EC2 instances changes the metric collection interval from 5 minutes to 1 minute, generating six times more metric data points. This increases your CloudWatch metrics charges without affecting CloudWatch Logs storage or retention in any way. For a log-heavy risk simulation, this would likely inflate costs further rather than provide a lifecycle solution.
- ✗
Route 53 health checks
Why it's wrong here
Route 53 health checks are used to monitor the availability and latency of endpoints (e.g., web servers, load balancers) and to support DNS failover. They produce health check status metrics but have no interaction with CloudWatch Logs data storage or expiration. Therefore, they cannot address the issue of accumulating log data.
Quick reference
AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison
| Storage Class | Min Duration | Retrieval | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard | None | Immediate | Frequently accessed data |
| S3 Standard-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Infrequent access, rapid retrieval |
| S3 One Zone-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Non-critical infrequent data |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering | None | Immediate–hours | Unknown or changing access patterns |
| S3 Glacier Instant | 90 days | Milliseconds | Archive with instant retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Flexible | 90 days | Minutes–hours | Archive, flexible retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive | 180 days | Hours | Long-term compliance archive |
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JA
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.