Domain 4: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures Flashcards
ou are managing data storage for your company, and there are many EBS volumes. Your management team has given you some new requirements. Certain metrics on the EBS volumes need to be monitored, and the database team needs to be notified by email when certain metric thresholds are exceeded. Which AWS services can be configured to meet these requirements? CHOOSE 2
SNS
SQS
SWF
SES
CloudWatch
SNS
CloudWatch can be used to monitor the volume, and SNS can be used to send emails to the Ops team. Amazon SNS is for messaging-oriented applications, with multiple subscribers requesting and receiving “push” notifications of time-critical messages via a choice of transport protocols, including HTTP, Amazon SQS, and email.
CloudWatch
CloudWatch can be used to monitor the volume, and SNS can be used to send emails to the Ops team. Amazon SNS is for messaging-oriented applications, with multiple subscribers requesting and receiving “push” notifications of time-critical messages via a choice of transport protocols, including HTTP, Amazon SQS, and email.
A company needs to deploy EC2 instances to handle overnight batch processing. This includes media transcoding and some voice to text transcription. This is not high priority work, and it is OK if these batch runs get interrupted. What is the best EC2 instance purchasing option for this work?
Dedicated Hosts
On-Demand
Spot
Reserved
Spot
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/instance-purchasing-options.html
Amazon EC2 provides the following purchasing options to enable you to optimize your costs based on your needs: On-Demand Instances – Pay, by the second, for the instances that you launch. Savings Plans – Reduce your Amazon EC2 costs by making a commitment to a consistent amount of usage, in USD per hour, for a term of 1 or 3 years. Reserved Instances – Reduce your Amazon EC2 costs by making a commitment to a consistent instance configuration, including instance type and Region, for a term of 1 or 3 years. Scheduled Instances – Purchase instances that are always available on the specified recurring schedule, for a one-year term. Spot Instances – Request unused EC2 instances, which can reduce your Amazon EC2 costs significantly. Dedicated Hosts – Pay for a physical host that is fully dedicated to running your instances, and bring your existing per-socket, per-core, or per-VM software licenses to reduce costs. Dedicated Instances – Pay, by the hour, for instances that run on single-tenant hardware. Capacity Reservations – Reserve capacity for your EC2 instances in a specific Availability Zone for any duration. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-spot-instances.html
A Spot Instance is an unused EC2 instance that is available for less than the On-Demand price. Because Spot Instances enable you to request unused EC2 instances at steep discounts, you can lower your Amazon EC2 costs significantly. The hourly price for a Spot Instance is called a Spot price. The Spot price of each instance type in each Availability Zone is set by Amazon EC2, and adjusted gradually based on the long-term supply of and demand for Spot Instances. Your Spot Instance runs whenever capacity is available and the maximum price per hour for your request exceeds the Spot price.
Your team owns three separate AWS accounts: one for production, one for staging, and one for development. Recently, there has been a push from the CEO to begin breaking down costs to the most comprehensive, detailed level. In addition to this level of detail, the team needs to store daily comma-separated value (CSV) reports in Amazon S3 for ingestion into the company’s internal analytics tooling.
What would be the most efficient solution for this scenario?
Use AWS Cost and Usage Reports to generate reports, and have it export CSV reports daily to a centralized Amazon S3 bucket.
Use AWS Budgets to alert and generate reports, and use AWS Lambda to pull data, generate CSV reports, and then push them to Amazon S3.
Use AWS Budgets to alert and generate reports on current spend, and use AWS Fargate to pull data, generate CSV reports, and then push them to Amazon S3.
Use AWS Cost and Usage Reports to generate reports with the required amount of detail. Set up Amazon EventBridge (Amazon CloudWatch Events) to trigger a rule to create and then export CSV reports daily to a centralized Amazon S3 bucket.
Use AWS Cost and Usage Reports to generate reports, and have it export CSV reports daily to a centralized Amazon S3 bucket.
AWS Cost and Usage Reports offers the greatest amount of detail for spending reports. They can also be set up to automatically store updated reports in Amazon S3 every 24 hours.
After an IT Steering Committee meeting, you have been put in charge of configuring a hybrid environment for the company’s compute resources. You weigh the pros and cons of various technologies based on the requirements you are given. The decision you make is to go with Direct Connect. Which option best describes the features Direct Connect provides?
A connection between on-premises and VPC, using secure and private connection with IPsec and TLS
A private, dedicated network connection between your facilities and AWS
A network connection between two VPCs that can route traffic using IPv4 or IPv6
A cost-effective, private network connection that bypasses the internet
A private, dedicated network connection between your facilities and AWS
Correct: AWS Direct Connect is a cloud service solution that makes it easy to establish a dedicated network connection from your premises to AWS. Using AWS Direct Connect, you can establish private connectivity between AWS and your datacenter, office, or colocation environment, which in many cases can reduce your network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than internet-based connections.
AWS Direct Connect makes it easy to establish a dedicated connection from an on-premises network to one or more VPCs in the same region. Using private VIF on AWS Direct Connect, you can establish private connectivity between AWS and your data center, office, or colocation environment.
AWS Direct Connect can reduce network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than internet-based connections.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/aws-vpc-connectivity-options/aws-direct-connect.html
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/aws-vpc-connectivity-options/network-to-amazon-vpc-connectivity-options.html
You work for a Defense contracting company. The company develops software applications which perform intensive calculations in the area of Mechanical Engineering related to metals for ship building. You have a 3-year contract and decide to purchase reserved EC2 instances for a 3-year duration. You are informed that the particular program has been cancelled abruptly and negotiations have brought the contract to an amicable conclusion one year early. What can you do to stop incurring charges and save money on the EC2 instances?
Sell the reserved instances on the Reserved Instance Marketplace.
Convert the instances to Spot Instances and allow them to go away through attrition.
Change the instance states from running to stopped.
Write AWS and ask to terminate the contract.
Sell the reserved instances on the Reserved Instance Marketplace.
The Reserved Instance Marketplace is a platform that supports the sale of third-party and AWS customers’ unused Standard Reserved Instances, which vary in term lengths and pricing options. For example, you may want to sell Reserved Instances after moving instances to a new AWS Region, changing to a new instance type, ending projects before the term expiration, when your business needs change, or if you have unneeded capacity.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri-market-general.html
You have recently migrated your small company to AWS and are looking for some general best practice guidance within the platform. Which AWS service can help you optimize your AWS environment by giving recommendations to reduce cost, increase performance, and improve security?
AWS Inspector
AWS Organizations
AWS Optimizations
AWS Trusted Advisor
AWS Trusted Advisor
Correct: AWS Trusted Advisor is an online tool that provides you realtime guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices. Trusted Advisor checks help optimize your AWS infrastructure, increase security and performance, reduce your overall costs, and monitor service limits. Whether establishing new workflows, developing applications, or as part of ongoing improvement, take advantage of the recommendations provided by Trusted Advisor on a regular basis to help keep your solutions provisioned optimally.
After an IT Steering Committee meeting, you have been put in charge of configuring a hybrid environment for the company’s compute resources. You weigh the pros and cons of various technologies, such as VPN and Direct Connect, and based on the requirements you have decided to configure a VPN connection. What features and advantages can a VPN connection provide?
It provides a cost-effective, private network connection that bypasses the internet.
It provides a network connection between two VPCs that can route traffic using IPv4 or IPv6.
It provides a private, dedicated network connection between an on-premises network and the VPC.
It provides a connection between an on-premises network and a VPC, using a secure and private connection with IPsec and TLS.
It provides a connection between an on-premises network and a VPC, using a secure and private connection with IPsec and TLS.
Correct: A VPC/VPN Connection utilizes IPSec to establish encrypted network connectivity between your intranet and Amazon VPC over the Internet. VPN Connections can be configured in minutes and are a good solution if you have an immediate need, have low-to-modest bandwidth requirements, and can tolerate the inherent variability in Internet-based connectivity.
AWS Client VPN is a managed client-based VPN service that enables you to securely access your AWS resources or your on-premises network. With AWS Client VPN, you configure an endpoint to which your users can connect to establish a secure TLS VPN session. This enables clients to access resources in AWS or on-premises from any location using an OpenVPN-based VPN client.
You can create an IPsec VPN connection between your VPC and your remote network. On the AWS side of the Site-to-Site VPN connection, a virtual private gateway or transit gateway provides two VPN endpoints (tunnels) for automatic failover. You configure your customer gateway device on the remote side of the Site-to-Site VPN connection.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/vpn-connections.html
Selected
A testing team is using a group of EC2 instances to run batch, automated tests on an application. The tests run overnight, but don’t take all night. The instances sit idle for long periods of time and accrue unnecessary charges. What can you do to stop these instances when they are idle for long periods?
Write a cron job which queries the instance status. Also write a Lambda function which can be triggered upon a certain status and stop the instance.
Write a Python script which queries the instance status. Also write a Lambda function which can be triggered upon a certain status and stop the instance.
Write a cron job which queries the instance status. If a certain status is met, have the cron job kick off CloudFormation to terminate the existing instance, and create a new instance from a template.
You can create a CloudWatch alarm that is triggered when the average CPU utilization percentage has been lower than 10 percent for 4 hours, and stops the instance.
You can create a CloudWatch alarm that is triggered when the average CPU utilization percentage has been lower than 10 percent for 4 hours, and stops the instance.
Adding Stop Actions to Amazon CloudWatch Alarms: You can create an alarm that stops an Amazon EC2 instance when a certain threshold has been met. For example, you may run development or test instances and occasionally forget to shut them off. You can create an alarm that is triggered when the average CPU utilization percentage has been lower than 10 percent for 24 hours, signaling that it is idle and no longer in use. You can adjust the threshold, duration, and period to suit your needs, plus you can add an SNS notification, so that you will receive an email when the alarm is triggered.
Amazon EC2 instances that use an Amazon Elastic Block Store volume as the root device can be stopped or terminated, whereas instances that use the instance store as the root device can only be terminated. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/UsingAlarmActions.html
Selected
You have joined a newly formed software company as a Solutions Architect. It is a small company, and you are the only employee with AWS experience. The owner has asked for your recommendations to ensure that the AWS resources are deployed to proactively remain within budget. Which AWS service can you use to help ensure you don’t have cost overruns for your AWS resources?
Inspector
Billing and Cost Management
Cost Explorer
AWS Budgets
AWS Budgets
Correct - AWS Budgets gives you the ability to set custom budgets that alert you when your costs or usage exceed (or are forecasted to exceed) your budgeted amount. You can also use AWS Budgets to set reservation utilization or coverage targets and receive alerts when your utilization drops below the threshold you define. And remember the keyword, proactively. With AWS Budgets, we can be proactive about attending to cost overruns before they become a major budget issue at the end of the month or quarter. Budgets can be tracked at the monthly, quarterly, or yearly level, and you can customize the start and end dates. You can further refine your budget to track costs associated with multiple dimensions, such as AWS service, linked account, tag, and others. Budget alerts can be sent via email and/or Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) topic. You can also use AWS Budgets to set a custom reservation utilization target and receive alerts when your utilization drops below the threshold you define. RI utilization alerts support Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon ElastiCache reservations. Budgets can be created and tracked from the AWS Budgets dashboard, or via the Budgets API.
https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/aws-budgets/
Selected
You are working in a large healthcare facility that uses EBS volumes on most of the EC2 instances. The CFO has approached you about some cost savings, and it has been decided that some of the EC2 instances and EBS volumes would be deleted. What step can be taken to preserve the data on the EBS volumes and ensure the data can be restored to a new EBS volume within minutes?
Take point-in-time snapshots of your Amazon EBS volumes.
Move the data to Amazon S3.
Store the data in CloudFormation user data.
Use S3 Glacier using the Standard retrieval tier.
Take point-in-time snapshots of your Amazon EBS volumes.
You can back up the data on your Amazon EBS volumes to Amazon S3 by taking point-in-time snapshots. Snapshots are incremental backups, which means that only the blocks on the device that have changed after your most recent snapshot are saved. This minimizes the time required to create the snapshot and saves on storage costs by not duplicating data. When you delete a snapshot, only the data unique to that snapshot is removed. Each snapshot contains all of the information that is needed to restore your data (from the moment when the snapshot was taken) to a new EBS volume. Reference: Amazon EBS Snapshots
Your company needs to shift an application to the cloud. You are looking for a solution to collect, process, gain immediate insight, and then transfer the application data to AWS. Part of this effort also includes moving a large data warehouse into AWS. The warehouse is 50TB, and it would take over a month to migrate the data using the current bandwidth available. What is the best option available to perform this one time migration considering both cost and performance aspects?
AWS Snowball Edge
AWS SnowMobile
AWS Direct Connect
AWS VPN
AWS Snowball Edge
The AWS Snowball Edge is a type of Snowball device with on-board storage and compute power for select AWS capabilities. Snowball Edge can undertake local processing and edge-computing workloads in addition to transferring data between your local environment and the AWS Cloud.
Each Snowball Edge device can transport data at speeds faster than the internet. This transport is done by shipping the data in the appliances through a regional carrier. The appliances are rugged shipping containers, complete with E Ink shipping labels. The AWS Snowball Edge device differs from the standard Snowball because it can bring the power of the AWS Cloud to your on-premises location, with local storage and compute functionality.
Snowball Edge devices have three options for device configurations: storage optimized, compute optimized, and with GPU. When this guide refers to Snowball Edge devices, it’s referring to all options of the device. Whenever specific information applies to only one or more optional configurations of devices, like how the Snowball Edge with GPU has an on-board GPU, it will be called out. For more information, see Snowball Edge Device Options. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/snowball/latest/developer-guide/whatisedge.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/snowball/latest/ug/device-differences.html
A company is going to use several EC2 instances to host various reference applications. The applications are expected to receive steady and relatively low traffic. These applications are expected to run for 3 years, at which time the applications will be evaluated for upgrade. What type of EC2 will meet this requirement considering cost as an additional factor?
Reserved
Spot
Dedicated Hosts
On-Demand
Reserved
Reserved Instances provide you with a significant discount (up to 75%) compared to On-Demand instance pricing. In addition, when Reserved Instances are assigned to a specific Availability Zone, they provide a capacity reservation, giving you additional confidence in your ability to launch instances when you need them. For applications that have steady state or predictable usage, Reserved Instances can provide significant savings compared to using On-Demand instances. Reserved Instances are recommended for:
Applications with steady state usage
Applications that may require reserved capacity
Customers that can commit to using EC2 over a 1 or 3 year term to reduce their total computing costs
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/reserved-instances/
Your company has a multi-account AWS environment with over 100 accounts. Each account belongs to a specific application team within the company, and they all fall within the same consolidated billing family. The company has just received funding for the next two years, but they are unsure about anything beyond that. With this in mind, they plan on aggressively deploying applications to AWS during the two years.
Recently, there was a massive spike in unplanned Amazon EC2 and AWS Lambda costs, causing significant financial stress.
What can an organization administrator do to maximize savings for the entire organization for this first year?
Purchase a one-year All Upfront EC2 Instance Savings Plan.
Purchase a three-year All Upfront EC2 Instance Savings Plan.
Purchase a one-year All Upfront Compute Savings Plan.
Purchase a three-year All Upfront Compute Savings Plan.
Purchase a one-year All Upfront Compute Savings Plan.
This type of Savings Plan covers both Amazon EC2 and AWS Lambda function compute costs. It is the most flexible type offered. They can purchase a one-year All Upfront offering to maximize savings for the first year.
Reference: What Are Savings Plans?
Reference: Purchasing Savings Plans
