SAA-C03 practice questions: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures

Answer: C. 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. Source: AWS SAA-C03 Exam Guide - Domain 4: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures

Answer: B. Task Statement 4.3 covers data retention policies and designing appropriate backup and retention policies including snapshot frequency. Amazon RDS automated backups provide point-in-time recovery across the retention period, which makes extra manual snapshots inside that window redundant. The Amazon RDS quotas page gives 'Manual DB instance snapshots' as 100 for each supported Region and notes that 'backups managed by AWS Backup are considered manual DB snapshots, but don't count toward the manual snapshot quota', which is why moving the long-term copies into a backup plan both expresses the monthly rule once and clears the quota. Exporting a snapshot to Amazon S3 produces analytics data, not a restorable DB snapshot. Source: AWS SAA-C03 Exam Guide - Domain 4: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures

Answer: C. Task Statement 4.1 covers selecting the appropriate backup and archival solution and storage tiering. The Amazon S3 User Guide's archive retrieval options topic gives the three tiers for S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval: Expedited objects under 250 MB 'are typically made available within 1-5 minutes' and are 'charged at the Expedited request and retrieval rate'; 'Standard retrievals typically finish within 3-5 hours'; and 'Bulk retrievals typically finish within 5-12 hours'. The same page states that 'Bulk retrievals are free for objects that are stored in the S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval or S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage classes', and the S3 pricing page repeats it: 'S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval Bulk data retrievals and requests are free of charge.' Provisioned capacity is described there as a way to 'ensure that Expedited retrieval capacity is available when you need it'. Two tiers land inside the 12-hour window and one of them costs nothing. Source: AWS SAA-C03 Exam Guide - Domain 4: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures

Answer: C. Spot Instances are not covered by Savings Plans. A Savings Plan does not give extra savings on Spot usage, and Spot spend does not apply the commitment of a Compute Savings Plan. Terms of the commitment can't be changed after purchase, so moving the fleet may leave commitment unused. Source: Amazon Web Services documentation (docs.aws.amazon.com), Pricing and savings, p. n/a Source: AWS SAA-C03 Exam Guide - Domain 1: Design Secure Architectures

Answer: D. In provisioned mode you are charged for the hourly capacity you provision, not what you consume, which suits steady, forecastable workloads. On-demand mode bills per request and scales automatically, so a spiky, unpredictable pattern avoids paying for idle peak capacity. Source: Amazon Web Services documentation (docs.aws.amazon.com), Provisioned mode, p. n/a Source: AWS SAA-C03 Exam Guide - Domain 1: Design Secure Architectures