AWS AWS Cost Management 1 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: What is AWS Cost Explorer used for?
- Visualizing, understanding, and managing AWS spending patterns over time (Correct answer)
- Exploring new AWS services
- Browsing the AWS Marketplace
- Managing S3 bucket permissions
Correct answer: Visualizing, understanding, and managing AWS spending patterns over time
AWS Cost Explorer provides interactive graphs and reports to visualize spending patterns, identify cost trends, forecast future costs, and discover opportunities for savings across AWS services.
Question 2: What are AWS Savings Plans?
- Flexible pricing models offering significant discounts in exchange for a consistent usage commitment (Correct answer)
- Free tier services that never expire
- Coupons for AWS training courses
- Discount codes for AWS certifications
Correct answer: Flexible pricing models offering significant discounts in exchange for a consistent usage commitment
AWS Savings Plans offer up to 72% savings compared to On-Demand pricing in exchange for a commitment to a consistent amount of usage ($/hour) for 1 or 3 years, applicable to EC2, Lambda, and Fargate.
Question 3: What is the difference between Reserved Instances and Spot Instances?
- Reserved provide discounts for committed usage; Spot offer deep discounts on unused capacity that can be interrupted (Correct answer)
- Reserved are more expensive than On-Demand
- Spot instances are guaranteed to run continuously
- There is no price difference between them
Correct answer: Reserved provide discounts for committed usage; Spot offer deep discounts on unused capacity that can be interrupted
Reserved Instances provide up to 75% discount for 1-3 year commitments, while Spot Instances offer up to 90% discount on unused EC2 capacity but can be interrupted with 2 minutes notice when AWS needs the capacity.
Question 4: What is AWS Budgets and how does it help with cost management?
- A service to set custom spending thresholds and receive alerts when costs exceed or are forecasted to exceed budgets (Correct answer)
- A financial planning tool for business strategy
- A service that automatically reduces AWS spending
- A tool for creating AWS billing invoices
Correct answer: A service to set custom spending thresholds and receive alerts when costs exceed or are forecasted to exceed budgets
AWS Budgets allows you to set custom cost, usage, and reservation budgets with configurable alerts that notify you via email or SNS when actual or forecasted spending approaches or exceeds defined thresholds.
Question 5: What is the AWS Well-Architected Framework's cost optimization pillar?
- A set of best practices for running systems that deliver business value at the lowest cost (Correct answer)
- A framework for finding the cheapest AWS region
- A discount program for well-designed architectures
- A certification program for cost analysts
Correct answer: A set of best practices for running systems that deliver business value at the lowest cost
The cost optimization pillar focuses on avoiding unnecessary costs, understanding spending, selecting the right resources, matching supply with demand, and using managed services to reduce total cost of ownership.
Question 6: What is the purpose of AWS Trusted Advisor cost optimization checks?
- To identify idle resources, underutilized instances, and opportunities to save money (Correct answer)
- To verify that AWS services are functioning correctly
- To recommend architectural changes for performance
- To check for security vulnerabilities only
Correct answer: To identify idle resources, underutilized instances, and opportunities to save money
Trusted Advisor's cost optimization checks identify idle EC2 instances, underutilized EBS volumes, unassociated Elastic IP addresses, idle load balancers, and other resources that could be right-sized or eliminated to reduce costs.
AWS AWS Cost Management 1
What is AWS Cost Explorer used for?