SOA-C02 Cost and Performance Optimization Practice Question

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

• ✗

  AWS Budgets

  Why it's wrong here

  AWS Budgets allows you to create custom cost and usage thresholds and receive alerts when spending approaches or exceeds them, but it does not provide a central, administrative tracking view across multiple accounts. With consolidated billing, budgets in the payer account can reflect aggregated costs, but each budget must be scoped to specific dimensions or tags, and the service itself only sends notifications—it does not aggregate or manage costs. True central tracking requires a single account to consolidate billing, which is a capability of AWS Organizations, not AWS Budgets.

• ✗

  AWS Config

  Why it's wrong here

  AWS Config is a service for recording resource configuration changes and evaluating those configurations against compliance rules. It has no cost-tracking or cost-analysis capability, and it cannot produce a unified cost report or a single bill across multiple accounts. Even if you use Config Aggregators to combine configuration data from multiple accounts, that data represents resource properties, not usage costs, making it irrelevant for central cost management.

• ✗

  AWS Trusted Advisor

  Why it's wrong here

  AWS Trusted Advisor provides best-practice recommendations, including cost optimization checks that identify underutilized or idle resources and estimate potential savings. However, it does not give you a real-time, aggregated view of actual spending across all accounts—it checks individual accounts and relies on point-in-time snapshots of account health. Its purpose is advisory guidance, not operational cost tracking or budget management, so it does not solve the requirement for centralized cost visibility.

• ✓

  AWS Organizations

  Why this is correct

  AWS Organizations is the correct answer because it provides consolidated billing, which automatically aggregates cost and usage data from all member accounts into a single payer account. This gives you a single monthly bill, enables Cost Explorer to analyze cross-account spend, and supports central cost allocation tags. It is the foundational service that allows you to see and manage costs across the entire AWS environment from one place, making it essential for central cost management.

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