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Cost Optimization practice questions

Practise AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional SAP-C02 Cost Optimization practice questions — original exam-style scenarios with answer choices, explanations, and analysis of common mistakes.

Courseiva uses original exam-style practice questions designed for learning and revision. The goal is to understand the concepts, recognise exam patterns, and improve through explanations — not memorise copied exam dumps.

Reviewed byJohnson Ajibi· MSc IT Security
20 questionsDomain: Cost Optimization

What the exam tests

What to know about Cost Optimization

QoS questions usually test traffic classification (DSCP/CoS), queuing strategies, policing vs shaping and where each mechanism is applied.

DSCP and CoS marking and trust boundaries.

Queuing mechanisms: FIFO, WFQ, CBWFQ, LLQ.

Policing (drops excess) vs shaping (delays excess).

Where QoS is applied: ingress, egress, LAN, WAN.

Watch out for

Common Cost Optimization exam traps

  • Policing drops traffic; shaping buffers it — they solve different problems.
  • DSCP EF (46) is for voice; AF classes are for data tiers.
  • QoS must be configured end-to-end to be effective.
  • CoS values are Layer 2; DSCP is Layer 3.

Practice set

Cost Optimization questions

20 questions · select your answer, then reveal the explanation

A company uses AWS Organizations with consolidated billing. The finance team needs to track costs by department, which are tagged with 'department' tags. However, some resources are not tagged. The team wants to ensure that all new resources are tagged, and existing untagged resources are identified. What should they do?

A company is using AWS Organizations with consolidated billing. The finance team wants to track costs by business unit. Each business unit has its own AWS account. The team needs a solution that allows them to generate cost reports filtered by business unit without additional overhead. Which action should be taken?

A company wants to store application logs in a centralized location for analysis. The logs are generated by EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. The solution must be cost-effective and support real-time analysis. Which service should be used to collect and analyze the logs?

A company is designing a new multi-region disaster recovery solution for a critical application running on AWS. The primary region is us-east-1. The application uses Amazon RDS for MySQL with Multi-AZ, and runs on EC2 instances behind an ALB. The RPO must be less than 5 minutes, and RTO less than 30 minutes. The company wants to minimize costs when the DR solution is not in use. Which solution should a Solutions Architect recommend?

Question 5mediummultiple choice
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A company is designing a microservices architecture using Amazon ECS with Fargate. Each microservice needs to communicate with others via REST APIs. The company wants to ensure that communication is encrypted in transit and that services can discover each other using DNS names. Which set of actions should the company take?

A company manages multiple AWS accounts and wants to centralize billing and cost tracking. They have enabled AWS Organizations and consolidated billing. Which additional step should they take to gain granular visibility into costs per department?

A company has multiple AWS accounts and wants to centralize operational data such as cost reports, security findings, and resource inventory. The solution should provide a single pane of glass for the operations team. Which AWS service should be used?

A company is designing a new application that will run on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer. The application requires that users' session data be stored durably and with low latency. The session data is accessed frequently but is rarely updated. Which solution is MOST cost-effective?

A company is designing a new batch processing system that processes large files from Amazon S3. The processing is CPU-intensive and can take up to 2 hours per file. The company wants to minimize cost and avoid idle compute capacity. Which THREE components should the architect include? (Choose THREE.)

A company is designing a data lake on AWS using Amazon S3. The data lake will store petabytes of data from various sources. The company needs to query the data using Amazon Athena and Amazon Redshift Spectrum. The data is highly compressed and stored in Parquet format. Which storage class should be used to minimize costs while maintaining immediate query performance?

Question 11mediummultiple choice
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A media company delivers video content to a global audience using Amazon CloudFront, AWS Lambda@Edge, and Amazon S3. The origin is an S3 bucket that stores video files. Recently, users in Asia-Pacific report slow load times. The operations team checks CloudFront metrics and sees a high cache miss rate for content popular in that region. The team wants to improve performance for all users without significantly increasing costs. The application uses a single CloudFront distribution with a default cache behavior. The S3 bucket is in us-east-1. Which solution should the team implement?

A company has a multi-account AWS environment and wants to enforce that all IAM roles in member accounts must include a specific tag (e.g., CostCenter). Which THREE steps should be taken to enforce this policy using AWS Organizations?

A company is designing a real-time analytics platform that ingests data from thousands of IoT devices. Each device sends a JSON payload every second. The company needs to store the raw data for a month and then aggregate it into hourly summaries for long-term storage. The solution must be serverless and cost-effective. Which combination of AWS services should the company use?

A company wants to reduce costs for its Amazon RDS for MySQL database without affecting performance. The database is used by a read-intensive application. Which action should the company take?

Question 15mediummultiple choice
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A company runs a web application on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer. The application experiences sudden traffic spikes. What is the most effective way to ensure the application can handle the spikes without manual intervention?

A company runs a stateless web application on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. The application experiences high latency during peak hours. The operations team suspects that the instances are overloaded. Which TWO actions should the team take to improve performance and scalability? (Choose two.)

Question 17mediummultiple choice
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A company migrated a monolithic application to a microservices architecture on Amazon ECS. They notice that the CPU utilization of the cluster is high, but individual services are underutilized. What is the best optimization?

Question 18mediummultiple choice
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A company is migrating a batch processing workload to AWS. The workload runs on a schedule and processes large files stored on a network file system. The company wants to use a serverless architecture to reduce costs. Which combination of AWS services should the company use?

A company is using Amazon DynamoDB as the primary database for a web application. The application experiences occasional throttling on writes. The company wants to implement a solution that automatically increases write capacity during traffic spikes. Which solution should they use?

Question 20mediummultiple choice
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A financial services company needs to store transaction records for 7 years to meet regulatory requirements. The records must be retrievable within 24 hours of a request. The volume of data is 10 TB per year. Which storage solution is MOST cost-effective?

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Frequently asked questions

What does the SAP-C02 exam test about Cost Optimization?
QoS questions usually test traffic classification (DSCP/CoS), queuing strategies, policing vs shaping and where each mechanism is applied.
How should I use these practice questions?
Select your answer before revealing the explanation. Then read why each option is right or wrong — this active recall approach builds retention far faster than re-reading notes.
Can I practise just Cost Optimization questions in a focused session?
Yes — the session launcher on this page draws every question from the Cost Optimization domain. Use a 10-question session first to gauge your baseline, then move to 20 or 30 once the weak spots are clear.
Where can I practise other SAP-C02 topics?
Use the topic links above to move to related areas, or go back to the SAP-C02 question bank to see all topics.
Are these real exam questions or dumps?
These are original practice questions written to test the same concepts the SAP-C02 exam covers. They are not copied from any real exam or dump site.