An internal team runs a report-generation job once per day. It typically finishes in a few minutes, and even on its slowest days it still completes in under 15 minutes. The team wants to reduce operational overhead and pay primarily for actual runtime instead of keeping servers running 24/7. Which AWS approach best matches these goals?

Deploy the job on EC2 instances and keep them running continuously for the daily schedule.

Always-on EC2 instances increase cost and do not minimize operational overhead for short-lived jobs.

Run the job in an RDS database using stored procedures scheduled by the database engine.

RDS is not designed for general scheduled compute workloads like daily report generation.

Use an Auto Scaling group with a fixed minimum size of one instance and disable scaling.

A fixed-size Auto Scaling group still requires instance management and does not fully match runtime-based billing.

What does this SAA-C03 question test?

Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.

What is the correct answer to this question?

The correct answer is: Use AWS Lambda triggered by a schedule (for example, EventBridge) to run the report at the required time. — AWS Lambda triggered by a schedule is the best match because the job runs only once per day and the business wants to avoid paying for idle capacity. Lambda is serverless, which reduces operational overhead and charges based on actual execution time. Because the job always completes within Lambda's runtime limit, it fits the service model. The always-on EC2 and fixed-capacity alternatives keep costs and operations higher. Why others are wrong: Always-on EC2 keeps servers running even when there is no work, increasing cost and operational overhead. RDS stored procedures are not an appropriate general-purpose compute platform for scheduled report execution and can introduce operational coupling. A fixed minimum Auto Scaling group behaves like always-on capacity because scaling is effectively disabled, so it won't minimize spend based on actual runtime. Lambda with scheduled invocation best satisfies both cost and operational goals.

What should I do if I get this SAA-C03 question wrong?

Then try more questions from the same exam bank and focus on understanding why the wrong options are tempting.