Design Cost-Optimized Architectures

SAA-C03 · 60 questions

• A police records bureau stores cold case PDFs in Amazon S3 Standard even though they are almost never retrieved. Leadership wants to cut storage cost while keeping the objects durable in AWS for rare legal holds. Which approach best reduces cost?
• A city’s media archive in Amazon S3 has unpredictable access: some campaign videos go viral for a week, then sit untouched for months. Which storage class strategy best optimizes cost when access patterns are unknown?
• A computer-aided dispatch (CAD) database on Amazon EC2 uses Amazon EBS. Metrics show moderate IOPS needs well within gp3 capabilities, but the volume was provisioned as io2 for “future proofing.” What cost-aware storage change should the architect recommend?
• Engineering shares rarely touched CAD drawing archives on Amazon EFS. Most files are old reference sets opened a few times a year. How can the city lower EFS storage cost for that cold shared data?
• A municipality’s AWS Backup plan retains Amazon EBS snapshots forever, and storage costs grow every month even though policy only requires 35 days of operational recovery points. What change best addresses the cost of retention?
• IT must migrate large on-premises file shares to Amazon S3 for a records digitization project. A proposal suggests dozens of self-managed EC2 rsync workers. Which alternative better balances transfer effectiveness and operational cost?
• A field office needs block storage for a legacy application but wants to avoid buying a full on-premises disk array for mostly cold data. Which hybrid approach best minimizes local disk purchase while using Amazon S3 as durable backing store?
• The GIS office publishes a large open geospatial dataset in Amazon S3 that external researchers download heavily, driving up the city’s request and data-transfer bills. Which S3 feature best shifts those request and download costs to the requesters?
• Finance wants monthly chargeback reports that show Amazon S3 spend by department (parks, police, public works). What foundational practice enables that cost allocation?
• A digitization team uploads many large scanned permit packets to Amazon S3 daily. Leadership asks how to reduce PUT request overhead and stored bytes without changing durability goals. Which upload strategy best helps?
• A municipal GIS team provisioned 10 TB Amazon EBS volumes for mapping servers, but CloudWatch metrics show only about 1 TB used for months. What should the city architect do to cut storage cost without changing the application design?
• A small city wants Windows file shares for a handful of department apps and is comparing Amazon FSx for Windows File Server with a self-managed Windows file cluster on EC2. Which cost guidance should the architect emphasize?
• A county clerk must archive closed case PDFs that are rarely opened but, when needed, must appear within milliseconds for courtroom staff. Which Amazon S3 storage class best balances archive cost with that restore latency?
• A parks department shares CAD drawings on Amazon EFS. Traffic is usually low, with short bursts when planners open large plan sets. How should the architect control EFS throughput cost?
• After a public-works VM cleanup, the finance office still sees unexpected storage charges. Which approach best finds forgotten unattached Amazon EBS volumes?
• A city's CAD reporting fleet runs the same EC2 instance size 24/7 year-round with predictable CPU. Which purchasing approach most improves compute cost efficiency?
• A planning department runs overnight GIS tile-generation jobs that can restart from checkpoints if a worker stops. Which compute choice best reduces cost?
• An internal city-hall form API is invoked only a few dozen times per day and has no need for a persistent server. Which design most reduces idle compute cost?
• A municipality runs nonproduction container workloads that can tolerate interruption. Which approach best lowers container compute cost?
• CloudWatch shows a city's public web Auto Scaling group averaging very low CPU and memory on oversized instance types. What should the architect do first to cut waste?
• A county keeps a few bastion hosts that admins use rarely overnight, but each host must preserve in-memory session state when brought back. Which cost-saving compute action fits?
• A citizen portal must handle lunchtime spikes and quiet nights. Leadership proposes one very large EC2 instance. What cost-and-elasticity guidance should the architect give?
• A utilities API needs only TCP load balancing without HTTP routing, WAF integration, or path-based rules. How should the architect choose a load balancer with cost in mind?
• The city's nonproduction account mirrors production sizes and runs all night and weekend. Which change best reduces nonprod compute cost while keeping weekday testing?
• A town council asks whether every municipal app should run on AWS Outposts 'to be modern.' Which cost-aware recommendation is appropriate?
• Operators guess that a permitting app needs memory-optimized EC2 instances, but metrics show CPU saturation with comfortable free memory. What should the architect recommend?
• A public-safety department has a fixed monthly AWS compute allotment and needs early warning before overruns. Which service configuration supports that guardrail?
• Several micro AWS accounts for tiny city projects show idle Auto Scaling groups still billing. How should finance and architects improve accountability and cut waste?
• IoT hydrant sensors can preprocess readings at the edge or ship raw streams centrally. When is edge processing the cost-sensible architecture choice?
• A county assessor runs heavy valuation jobs once per month and currently keeps a large EC2 grid powered all month. What cost-optimized alternative should the architect propose?
• A civic events app sees unpredictable traffic spikes, while a meter-reading API has steady, well-known load. How should DynamoDB capacity modes be chosen for cost?
• A business-license database is busy during renewal season and nearly idle the rest of the year. Which relational option best aligns cost with that duty cycle?
• A city portal repeatedly reads the same reference data from Amazon RDS, driving a costly sprawl of read replicas. What cost-aware alternative should the architect evaluate?
• A serverless permit API opens many short database connections and forces the city to run a larger RDS instance than query CPU warrants. How can RDS Proxy help cost?
• A records system keeps daily Amazon RDS snapshots with a 365-day retention 'just in case,' far beyond the city's documented 7-day recovery policy. What should the architect recommend for backup cost?
• A county assessor still runs Oracle on premises and wants lower database license cost in AWS while keeping a managed relational engine. Which migration approach best targets that cost goal?
• A city permitting portal stores short-lived citizen session keys with simple key-value lookups and wants lower operations cost than an always-on relational database. Which design fits best?
• A municipal analytics warehouse on Amazon Redshift is busy only during weekday business hours and sits idle nights and weekends. Which cost control best matches that usage pattern?
• A township finance Aurora cluster feels slow, and staff want to jump to a much larger instance class immediately. What should the architect do first to avoid unnecessary cost?
• A parks department DynamoDB table accumulates ephemeral push-notification receipts that are useless after a few days and keep growing storage cost. Which control best limits that spend?
• A county runs RDS for both production tax systems and short-lived developer sandboxes. How should Multi-AZ be applied to control database cost without harming production RTO?
• Cost Explorer shows several county RDS instances nearly idle overnight while still accruing instance charges. Which action best reduces that waste?
• Heavy council dashboard queries keep forcing a municipal Aurora OLTP cluster to larger instance classes. Which architecture change best controls that database cost?
• A city clerk RDS database needs solid baseline performance but does not require provisioned io2-level IOPS. Which storage choice best balances cost and capability?
• A regional water authority considers an Aurora or RDS cross-Region read replica for a second office. When is that replica the cost-aware choice?
• A small township VPC has private-subnet workloads that need occasional outbound internet access. Leadership wants to limit NAT cost while understanding HA trade-offs. Which guidance is most accurate?
• Nightly municipal backups from private subnets go to Amazon S3 through a NAT Gateway, and data-processing charges are high. Which change most directly cuts that network cost?
• A city open-data site serves mostly static PDFs and images from an ALB/EC2 origin, and egress bills keep climbing. Which architecture change best reduces origin and data-transfer cost?
• A multi-county records bureau moves steady high-volume traffic between on-premises systems and AWS. Leadership asks whether AWS Direct Connect or Site-to-Site VPN is the cost-aware hybrid link. What should the architect do?
• A permit application's chatty app tier and database generate large cross-AZ data-transfer charges inside one Region. Which cost-aware placement approach is most appropriate while retaining HA?
• Several partner agencies need private access to a municipal API without building a full VPC peering mesh and extra NAT paths. Which approach can reduce cost and complexity?
• A citizen mobile API on API Gateway occasionally sees abusive request spikes that drive expensive downstream scale-out. Which control best caps that cost risk?
• A county ordered a Direct Connect port much larger than measured hybrid traffic after a cautious overestimate. What is the cost-aware next step?
• A city now has many VPCs and a growing mesh of peering links that is hard to operate. Leadership asks whether Transit Gateway is worth its attachment costs. What evaluation is most appropriate?
• Finance notices rising data-transfer charges and suspects unnecessary cross-Region replication in a parks account. Which approach best finds that waste?
• Citizens download large zoning PDFs that currently hairpin through EC2 and a NAT Gateway before reaching users. Which delivery path is more cost-efficient for public downloads?
• A county already has AWS Direct Connect for primary hybrid connectivity and needs failover. The SLA allows a VPN backup. Which design best controls redundancy cost?
• A municipal shared-services VPC accumulated many interface VPC endpoints for rarely used AWS APIs, and hourly endpoint ENI charges are noticeable. What should the architect do?
• A transit agency evaluates AWS Global Accelerator for a public API already fronted by DNS failover and CloudFront for static content. When is Global Accelerator the cost-aware choice?
• A city finance office cannot attribute NAT Gateway and Transit Gateway attachment charges back to parks, utilities, and public-safety departments. Which practice best enables that chargeback?