SOA-C02 Cost and Performance Optimization Practice Question
A company wants to optimize costs for its Amazon EC2 instances. Which TWO strategies are effective for reducing 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
✓
Use Spot Instances for fault-tolerant workloads.
Using Spot Instances for fault-tolerant workloads can reduce costs significantly (up to 90%). Rightsizing instances ensures you are not paying for unused capacity. Dedicated Hosts increase costs. Increasing provisioned IOPS increases costs. Using EBS General Purpose SSD (gp3) is cost-effective but not a primary cost reduction strategy.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Use Spot Instances for fault-tolerant workloads.
Why this is correct
Spot Instances are spare EC2 capacity sold at discounts of up to 90% compared to On-Demand pricing, but AWS can reclaim them with a two-minute warning. For fault-tolerant, stateless workloads that can endure interruptions, running on Spot Instances dramatically reduces compute spend without sacrificing performance. This makes Spot a primary cost-optimization lever for interruptible workloads.
- ✓
Rightsize instances based on utilization metrics.
Why this is correct
Rightsizing involves analyzing EC2 usage data—CPU, memory, network, and disk I/O—from CloudWatch and services like AWS Compute Optimizer to match instance types and sizes to actual workload demand. By downgrading over-provisioned instances or selecting newer generation families with better price-performance, you eliminate wasted capacity and lower hourly costs. Continuous rightsizing, combined with Auto Scaling, prevents over-provisioning while maintaining performance.
- ✗
Increase the provisioned IOPS for EBS volumes.
Why it's wrong here
Increasing the provisioned IOPS for EBS volumes, such as on io1 or io2 volumes, incurs additional per-GB and per-IOPS charges; the price scales linearly with the amount of IOPS you configure. Since cost optimization aims to reduce spend, adding IOPS is a performance enhancement that raises costs, not a savings measure. Only workloads with strict latency or throughput requirements need high IOPS, so it should not be used as a cost-reduction tactic.
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Use EBS General Purpose SSD (gp2) volumes instead of gp3.
Why it's wrong here
General Purpose SSD gp2 volumes are older and lack the independently scalable IOPS and throughput of gp3, and their price per GB is higher. gp3 volumes also offer a baseline of 3000 IOPS and 125 MB/s regardless of volume size, with the ability to provision additional performance at a lower marginal cost. Therefore, replacing gp3 with gp2 would increase storage costs and reduce configuration flexibility, making it anti-cost-optimization.
- ✗
Use Dedicated Hosts to meet compliance requirements.
Why it's wrong here
Dedicated Hosts are physical EC2 servers dedicated to your account, enabling you to use existing server-bound software licenses and meet compliance requirements that mandate physical tenancy. Because you pay for the entire host per hour regardless of how many instances run on it, it is substantially more expensive than shared tenancy or dedicated instances, especially for small workloads. Using Dedicated Hosts purely for cost optimization is counterproductive; they are a compliance and licensing solution, not a savings mechanism.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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