AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate — All Questions
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A fault-tolerant batch-processing job can be interrupted and resumed and runs at flexible times. Which EC2 purchasing option minimizes cost for this workload?
- a.EC2 Spot Instances✓
- b.On-Demand Instances
- c.A three-year Reserved Instance for steady 24/7 use
- d.A Dedicated Host
Spot Instances offer the deepest discount (up to about 90% off On-Demand) and are ideal for interruption-tolerant, flexible workloads like batch jobs. On-Demand costs the most for intermittent work, and Reserved Instances or Dedicated Hosts commit you to capacity better suited to steady-state, always-on usage.
Data is stored in S3 with unpredictable and changing access patterns, and the team wants to minimize cost without manually moving objects or writing lifecycle rules. Which storage class fits best?
- a.S3 Standard for everything
- b.S3 Glacier Deep Archive
- c.S3 Intelligent-Tiering✓
- d.S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access
S3 Intelligent-Tiering automatically moves objects between access tiers based on usage, optimizing cost when access patterns are unknown or changing, with no retrieval fees for the frequent and infrequent tiers. S3 Standard misses savings on cold data, Glacier Deep Archive adds retrieval latency unsuitable for unpredictable access, and One Zone-IA reduces resilience by storing in a single AZ.
A company must transfer 80 TB of data from an on-premises data center to S3, and its internet link would take months to upload that volume. Which option is most cost- and time-effective?
- a.Upload directly over the existing internet connection
- b.Provision a permanent Direct Connect line just for this one-time migration
- c.Use S3 Transfer Acceleration over the same link
- d.Use AWS Snowball to physically ship the data to AWS✓
AWS Snowball provides a physical, ruggedized device to move large datasets offline, which is faster and cheaper than saturating a slow internet link for a one-time 80 TB transfer. Direct internet upload and Transfer Acceleration are still bound by limited bandwidth. Provisioning Direct Connect for a single migration is costly and slow to set up relative to Snowball.
A company runs a predictable, steady baseline of compute across EC2 and Fargate and wants the best discount while retaining flexibility to change instance families and Regions. Which commitment model is most appropriate?
- a.Standard Reserved Instances locked to one instance type
- b.Compute Savings Plans with a one- or three-year hourly spend commitment✓
- c.Pay On-Demand rates continuously
- d.Spot Instances for the steady baseline
Compute Savings Plans offer discounts comparable to Reserved Instances in exchange for an hourly spend commitment, while flexibly applying across instance families, sizes, Regions, and even Fargate and Lambda. Standard RIs lock you to a specific instance type and Region, reducing flexibility. On-Demand forgoes savings, and Spot is unsuitable for a steady baseline that must not be interrupted.