Question 170
Finance has one compute Savings Plan with 99% commitment utilization, but the coverage report shows that only 35% of eligible predictable EC2, Fargate and Lambda usage receives a Savings Plans discount. Historical eligible spending has remained stable and workload forecasts show no imminent rightsizing. What conclusion should drive the next commitment calculation?
- The plan has low utilization because a 35% coverage rate is mathematically identical to commitment utilization, so cancel all new commitments.
- Evaluate additional commitment against the uncovered stable eligible hourly spend and forecast; high utilization and low coverage can coexist.
- Purchase a Reserved DB Instance instead because it applies its discount automatically to all EC2, Fargate and Lambda compute usage.
- Use a Cost Category allocation rule as a billing discount purchase mechanism that replaces a Savings Plan commitment.
Explanation
Correct Answer
B:A fully used existing commitment with substantial uncovered predictable eligible usage may justify carefully sized incremental commitments after forecast review.
Incorrect Answers
A:Coverage measures the share of eligible usage discounted, whereas utilization measures how fully a purchased hourly commitment is consumed.
C:Reserved DB Instances are an RDS pricing instrument, not a substitute for flexible EC2, Fargate and Lambda Savings Plans discounts.
D:Cost Categories attribute billing data to business dimensions; they do not create a new discounted compute commitment.
Question 171
An organization uses several long-running Oracle workloads on dedicated tenancy for licensing reasons. Finance proposes moving them to the cheapest shared-tenancy EC2 family without checking licensing contracts. What must architecture validate before assuming savings?
- Model licensing portability, host or tenancy constraints, compliance risk and actual eligible EC2 purchasing economics together.
- Ignore Oracle licensing terms because EC2 billing automatically authorizes any commercial database license on any host.
- Select an arbitrary shared tenancy solely because its EC2 hourly rate is smaller than the current host rate.
- Replace dedicated tenancy with a shared EC2 family and rely on an AWS Savings Plan to override Oracle BYOL host/tenancy terms.
Explanation
Correct Answer
A:BYOL license terms and tenancy restrictions can dominate total cost; an apparently cheaper instance may breach licensing or support requirements.
Incorrect Answers
B:AWS compute availability does not override third-party licensing conditions or vendor-certified deployment constraints.
C:Hourly compute price is only part of TCO and cannot establish whether the workload may legally change tenancy.
D:Commitment discounts affect eligible AWS infrastructure billing but do not change vendor license eligibility or dedicated-tenancy obligations.
Question 172
Cloud finance has enabled consolidated billing but needs an account-level forecast and an alarm when a new team is about to exceed its allocated monthly spending ceiling. Which feature directly addresses this requirement?
- Create AWS Budgets scoped to the relevant account or cost filters with forecasted and actual threshold alerts.
- Configure Cost Explorer service forecasts only, without an account-scoped budget alert destination or threshold.
- Enable AWS Cost Anomaly Detection and assume any predictable spending ceiling breach always appears as anomalous relative spend.
- Attach an OU-level SCP that limits launch regions but assume its policy automatically predicts account-level cost and emails finance.
Explanation
Correct Answer
A:Budgets provides tracked spending and forecast notifications that can be segmented by supported billing dimensions and organizational scope.
Incorrect Answers
B:Cost Explorer forecasting can inform decisions, but does not by itself provide the specified account-level budget alert workflow.
C:Anomaly alerts detect unusual patterns; a fixed approved monthly spending ceiling is more directly enforced as a forecasted AWS Budget.
D:SCPs constrain API authorization rather than estimating future spending or delivering cost-threshold notifications.
Question 173
A platform team has overallocated memory to EC2 instances for years, while metrics show consistently low utilization and workloads can be resized without breaking latency SLOs. What AWS recommendation service should it evaluate before changing instance families?
- Use AWS Trusted Advisor service-limit checks only to recommend every EC2 memory and CPU rightsizing change.
- Increase all instances to the largest family regardless of utilization so nobody needs to run a performance test.
- Use AWS Compute Optimizer recommendations and verify performance and cost against measured application utilization.
- Apply EC2 Auto Scaling target tracking to each current instance and treat desired fleet size as a validated instance-family rightsizing decision.
Explanation
Correct Answer
C:Compute Optimizer analyzes supported utilization to recommend instance and resource sizing changes that should be validated against workload constraints.
Incorrect Answers
A:Service quota/limit checks do not provide workload-telemetry-based instance-size recommendations equivalent to Compute Optimizer.
B:Unmeasured upsizing increases cost and does not correct historical overprovisioning.
D:Fleet scaling alters task/instance count, not the evidence-based individual EC2 instance sizing recommended by Compute Optimizer.
Question 174
A data science team transfers 30 TB monthly from S3 in Region A to compute instances in Region B. Cost and Usage Reports show large inter-Region transfer charges. The workload can execute safely near the source bucket. Which recommendation best targets the identified spend?
- Use an S3 gateway endpoint in Region B and assume it eliminates fees for accessing buckets in a different Region.
- Introduce S3 Cross-Region Replication of the same input data to Region B while leaving the original bulk reads and processing in Region B unchanged.
- Assess running eligible processing in the same Region as source data and measure the resulting data-transfer and compute cost.
- Enable S3 Transfer Acceleration on Region A and leave every compute job in Region B, assuming accelerated endpoints waive inter-Region byte charges.
Explanation
Correct Answer
C:Co-locating bulk processing with stored data can reduce cross-Region transfers while preserving required results and recovery safeguards.
Incorrect Answers
A:Gateway endpoints target supported service traffic within a Region and do not universally waive cross-Region data transfer.
B:Replicating bulk objects might change read locality after redesign, but adds storage and inter-Region replication charges and is not a direct immediate reduction without measured workload changes.
D:Transfer Acceleration can alter eligible internet upload path performance; it does not automatically eliminate Region-to-Region transfer charges.
Question 175
A business launches a fixed-price seasonal marketing campaign. Its owner wants an alert before the forecasted AWS spend for the campaign's tagged resources exceeds a preapproved budget, even if the pattern is not anomalous compared with last year. Which financial governance control is most direct?
- Create an AWS Budgets cost budget with suitable tag/account filters and forecasted-spend alert notifications to the campaign owner.
- Use AWS Cost Anomaly Detection alone, which only finds unexpected departures and guarantees notification before any ordinary planned budget is exceeded.
- Configure an AWS Cost Category called Seasonal Campaign but do not create an associated forecast budget or threshold notification.
- Set AWS Cost Explorer monthly group-by forecasts and rely on analysts to check the view after each invoice instead of notifying before the threshold.
Explanation
Correct Answer
A:AWS Budgets supports actual and forecasted budget thresholds, providing planned-limit visibility distinct from anomaly-based change detection.
Incorrect Answers
B:Anomaly detection monitors unusual relative spending behavior, not necessarily a particular approved campaign's forecast budget threshold.
C:Cost Categories classify charges; a category alone does not send forecast-based notifications on a preapproved spending ceiling.
D:Manual report review does not guarantee a timely alert before forecast spend exceeds the campaign budget.
Question 176
A finance director wants a nonproduction account to stop launching additional instances after forecast cloud spend exceeds an agreed threshold. The policy must take a supported automated action rather than merely send an email. What AWS Budgets feature is relevant?
- Set the cost allocation tag to DenyAll and assume tags universally deny API actions without a policy.
- Configure an AWS Budgets action tied to the appropriate budget threshold and a permitted IAM policy or SCP enforcement workflow.
- Use only a daily email budget report and assume it directly denies future EC2 RunInstances API requests.
- Attach an AWS Cost Categories split-charge rule and assume it automatically denies further EC2 launches when the category exceeds forecast.
Explanation
Correct Answer
B:Budget actions can trigger supported authorization or resource responses subject to governance permissions and action scope.
Incorrect Answers
A:Tag metadata needs explicit IAM/SCP evaluation to act as a preventive permission control.
C:Notifications alone do not enforce account authorization or change the affected service state.
D:Split-charge rules allocate shared cost for reporting; only a supported AWS Budgets action with IAM/SCP enforcement changes launch authorization.
Question 177
A large AWS Organization uses mixed EC2 instance families and EBS volumes. Architects want rightsizing recommendations based on measured performance rather than replacing every instance with the cheapest size. Which analytics service should be used?
- Use AWS Cost Explorer only to identify high monthly EC2 charges, without instance CPU, memory and EBS performance recommendations.
- Buy larger Compute Savings Plans before evaluating the observed utilization and existing commitments.
- Use AWS Compute Optimizer organization recommendations and validate performance headroom, telemetry and workload constraints before changes.
- Replace every production instance with the smallest available type without checking CPU, memory, storage or workload demand.
Explanation
Correct Answer
C:Compute Optimizer analyses supported resource metrics to suggest potential rightsize opportunities; production testing validates the tradeoff.
Incorrect Answers
A:Spend allocation alone lacks Compute Optimizer’s resource-level rightsizing analysis and measured performance risk dimensions.
B:New commitments may lock in waste when resources are already overprovisioned.
D:Blind downsizing risks performance failure and ignores actual utilization and resource requirements.
Question 178
Finance evaluates a shared AWS Organization bill and wants to see the effective discounted cost of EC2 after amortizing one-year Savings Plan commitments, not only the instantaneous On-Demand line item. Which reporting treatment is appropriate?
- Use only unblended AWS Cost Explorer costs and ignore commitment fee allocations when calculating effective workload unit costs.
- Use amortized or effective costs in AWS Cost Explorer or the detailed billing dataset, accounting for commitment fees and discounted usage.
- Compare only list On-Demand hourly rates and exclude all commitment fees from cost allocation.
- Use a raw hourly EC2 instance price list with no matching Savings Plans discounted-usage or commitment-fee records.
Explanation
Correct Answer
B:Amortization allocates prepaid or recurring commitment charges over covered usage periods for meaningful unit economics.
Incorrect Answers
A:Unblended cost omits the commitment-aware amortization treatment the question explicitly requires.
C:Excluding commitment fees overstates discounts and misrepresents the true effective service cost.
D:On-Demand list prices exclude the amortized commitment charges and applied discounts that determine effective billing cost.
Question 179
A central procurement team has Reserved Instances purchased in a payer-linked account. Some linked accounts need to benefit from shared applicable discounts, while one regulated account requires its RI discount benefits kept separate. Which billing configuration should be reviewed?
- Enable AWS Organizations consolidated billing while leaving Reserved Instance discount-sharing flags disabled for the accounts that should receive them.
- Review consolidated billing discount-sharing preferences and any approved Reserved Instance sharing restrictions by account.
- Replicate an EC2 Reserved Instance purchase separately into each workload account, rather than controlling sharing of existing commitments.
- Use an AWS Cost Category splitting chargebacks among accounts, expecting that categorization to override the payer RI sharing preferences.
Explanation
Correct Answer
B:RI discount sharing is a payer-account billing feature with scope controls; purchase location alone does not guarantee intended allocations.
Incorrect Answers
A:Consolidated billing is a prerequisite, but disabled RI discount sharing can still prevent eligible allocation to specified recipients.
C:New purchases add financial obligations and do not correct the currently misconfigured sharing scope of existing reservations.
D:Cost Categories reclassify costs for reporting and cannot replace the consolidated billing RI discount-sharing eligibility setting.
Question 180
A company wants storage-wide visibility into S3 object distribution, age and activity across dozens of accounts, rather than merely seeing S3 dollars in the billing console. The analytics team needs aggregation to identify excessive incomplete multipart uploads and unused storage classes. Which visibility service fits?
- Use S3 Inventory reports for individual bucket object metadata but assume they also provide an organization-wide summarized incomplete multipart storage dashboard by themselves.
- Inspect only AWS Cost Explorer S3 charges without storage-class, object-age and incomplete-multipart-uploads metrics across all buckets.
- Use S3 Storage Lens with the appropriate organization/dashboard scope and selected metrics or exports.
- Use only CloudTrail Event History, assuming it reports every bucket size and incomplete multipart upload trend by object age.
Explanation
Correct Answer
C:Storage Lens aggregates object storage usage and activity metrics to identify storage efficiency opportunities beyond raw billing totals.
Incorrect Answers
A:S3 Inventory can catalog specified object metadata but is not the combined cross-account Storage Lens metrics and activity analysis requested.
B:Cost totals are not the storage-specific object composition and trends that Storage Lens is designed to summarize.
D:API event history is not a purpose-built organization-wide storage analytics dataset.
AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional SAP-C02 Practice Tests