SAA-C03 · AWS · Design Cost-Optimized Architectures · Bank updated 2026-09-20
SAA-C03 practice questions: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
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These 5 questions come from the Design Cost-Optimized Architectures section of our SAA-C03 bank (12 questions on this area, which carries 20% of the real exam). Every question is original, with the correct answer explained and linked to the source it is drawn from.
1/5 · Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
A company is comparing the two Savings Plans types that apply to Amazon EC2 usage before committing to a three-year term. Which statement correctly describes how Compute Savings Plans differ from EC2 Instance Savings Plans?
ACompute Savings Plans are limited to Amazon EC2 usage, while EC2 Instance Savings Plans extend the same commitment to AWS Fargate and AWS Lambda usage as well as EC2.
BCompute Savings Plans require a commitment to one instance family in one Region, while EC2 Instance Savings Plans apply across instance families and Regions.
CCompute Savings Plans apply to Amazon EC2 usage regardless of instance family, size, Region, operating system, or tenancy, and also to Fargate and Lambda usage.
DCompute Savings Plans are purchased as a number of instances to be covered, while EC2 Instance Savings Plans are purchased as an hourly dollar commitment.
Show answer & explanation
C is correct. Task Statement 4.2 names AWS purchasing options including Savings Plans. AWS states that Compute Savings Plans 'provide lower prices on Amazon EC2 instance usage regardless of instance family, instance size, OS, tenancy, or AWS Region' and that this 'also applies to AWS Fargate and AWS Lambda usage', while EC2 Instance Savings Plans are committed 'to a specific instance family in a chosen AWS Region' and apply regardless of size, operating system, and tenancy within that family. Both are a per-hour spend commitment for a one-year or three-year term.
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2/5 · Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
A quarterly review shows that an account's Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS and AWS Lambda charges rose 40 percent while the traffic the applications serve stayed flat. Engineers believe that instances, volumes and functions were provisioned larger than their workloads need, but nobody has evidence for a particular resource. The team wants one service that reads each resource's own utilization metrics and returns a recommended size for the three resource types. Which service should the team use?
AOpt in to AWS Compute Optimizer for the account and work from the recommendations it publishes.
BOpen the rightsizing recommendations in AWS Cost Explorer and work from the list they produce.
CReview the AWS Trusted Advisor check for low utilization Amazon EC2 instances and work from the instances it flags.
DDeliver an AWS Cost and Usage Report to Amazon S3 and work from what Amazon Athena returns from it.
Show answer & explanation
A is correct. Task Statement 4.2 covers selecting the appropriate instance family and size and names AWS cost management tools. The Compute Optimizer User Guide states that the service 'analyzes your AWS resources' configuration and utilization metrics to provide you with rightsizing recommendations and identify idle resources', lists Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups, Amazon EBS volumes and AWS Lambda functions among supported resources, and notes that 'You must opt in to have Compute Optimizer analyze your AWS resources'. The Billing and Cost Management guide scopes Cost Explorer's rightsizing recommendations to Amazon EC2, and the AWS Support guide describes the low utilization check as an alert against fixed CPU and network thresholds over 14 days.
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3/5 · Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
A software vendor distributes a 2 GB installer from an Amazon S3 bucket. Each release is downloaded by tens of thousands of customers, most of them concentrated in a handful of countries, and the bill for that bucket is dominated by data transfer out to the internet rather than by storage. Downloads must stay at least as fast as they are today. Which change will most reduce the vendor's network cost?
ATurn on S3 Transfer Acceleration for the bucket and publish the accelerated endpoint as the download address.
BReplicate the bucket into four additional Regions and use latency-based Amazon Route 53 records to send each customer to the nearest copy of it.
CCreate an Amazon CloudFront distribution with the Amazon S3 bucket as its origin, and publish the download links through it.
DMove the installer objects into the S3 One Zone-IA storage class for the current and past releases.
Show answer & explanation
C is correct. Task Statement 4.4 covers determining strategic needs for content delivery networks and edge caching. The CloudFront Developer Guide states that copies of your files are 'held (or cached) in multiple edge locations around the world', that 'CloudFront charges for data transfers out from its edge locations, along with HTTP or HTTPS requests', and that 'the data transfer from your origin to CloudFront is always free when using AWS origins like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Elastic Load Balancing, or Amazon API Gateway. You are only billed for the outbound data transfer from CloudFront to the viewer when using AWS origins.' Caching a popular release at the edge therefore removes both the repeat reads of the bucket and the transfer billed out of it.
↗ AWS SAA-C03 Exam Guide — Domain 4: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
4/5 · Design Cost-Optimized Architectures · hard
A company gives 120 analysts a dedicated Amazon EC2 workstation each, every one of them sized at 64 GiB of memory. Every morning the workstation spends about 25 minutes loading a large dataset into memory before it is usable, and every evening the analysts go home and the workstations sit idle until the next day. Finance wants to stop paying instance hours outside working hours, and the analysts insist that the morning load must not happen again each day. Which solution will meet these requirements?
ATerminate the workstations each evening and relaunch them from an updated Amazon Machine Image each morning through a scheduled Auto Scaling action.
BKeep the workstations running around the clock but move them onto Spot Instances.
CMove the workstations to smaller instance types sized to the average working-hours load and leave them running day and night.
DRelaunch the workstations once from the same AMI with hibernation enabled, then hibernate them each evening and resume them each morning.
Show answer & explanation
D is correct. Task Statement 4.2 names scaling strategies including hibernation. The EC2 User Guide states that 'hibernation saves the contents from the instance memory (RAM) to your Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) root volume', that on restart 'the RAM contents are reloaded' and 'the instance retains its instance ID', and that 'you're not charged for instance usage for a hibernated instance when it is in the stopped state', although 'you are charged for storage of any EBS volumes, including storage for the RAM contents'. Two prerequisites decide whether the approach is available at all: 'you can't enable hibernation on an existing instance', and for Linux instances hibernation is supported only where instance RAM is less than 150 GiB.
↗ AWS SAA-C03 Exam Guide — Domain 4: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
5/5 · Design Cost-Optimized Architectures · hard
A cost review finds a large and growing public IPv4 address charge in one account. The account runs 400 Amazon EC2 instances in public subnets; each one is auto-assigned a public IPv4 address at launch, and all 400 only ever call a partner API outbound and never receive an inbound connection. The account also holds a handful of Elastic IP addresses that are associated with nothing. The 400 instances must keep their outbound access to the partner API. Which change will remove the public IPv4 address charge for those 400 instances?
ARelease the Elastic IP addresses in the account that are associated with no resource, and leave the 400 instances where they are.
BAllocate an Elastic IP address for each instance and associate it in place of the auto-assigned public IPv4 address it has now.
CAdd an IPv6 CIDR block to the VPC and to the subnets and give each of the 400 instances an IPv6 address as well.
DTurn off auto-assign public IPv4, move the 400 instances into private subnets, and route their outbound traffic through a NAT gateway.
Show answer & explanation
D is correct. Task Statement 4.4 covers reviewing existing workloads for network optimizations and configuring appropriate network routes to minimize network transfer costs. The EC2 User Guide's Elastic IP address pricing section states that 'there is a charge for all Elastic IP addresses whether they are in use (allocated to a resource, like an EC2 instance) or idle (created in your account but unallocated)' and that 'AWS charges for all public IPv4 addresses, including public IPv4 addresses associated with running instances and Elastic IP addresses'. The charge follows the address, not its idleness, so the only way to remove it for a fleet is to stop giving the fleet public addresses. The Amazon VPC User Guide states that a NAT gateway lets 'instances in a private subnet connect to services outside your VPC but external services cannot initiate a connection with those instances'.
↗ AWS SAA-C03 Exam Guide — Domain 4: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
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