Cost-Optimized Architecture Design (15%)

SAP-C03 · 45 questions

• A global media company streams product videos from an S3 bucket in us-east-1 to viewers in North America, Europe, and Asia. Origin fetch fees are spiking during launches, cache hit ratio is below 60%, and an origin outage must not cause playback failures. Which content delivery design best reduces data transfer and network costs while adding failover?
• A multi-account SaaS company with 40 AWS Organizations accounts cannot allocate shared platform spend because teams omit CostCenter and Environment tags on EC2 and S3 resources. Finance requires preventive enforcement on creation plus detection of existing gaps. Which policy-based tagging enforcement design provides preventive and detective cost allocation coverage?
• A SaaS company runs steady-state web APIs on EC2 24/7, nightly batch jobs for 4 hours that tolerate interruption, and spiky dev environments used a few hours weekly. Finance wants lowest cost without changing architecture and with minimal commitment risk. Which purchase mix best matches these usage patterns?
• A financial analytics firm runs nightly risk jobs on EC2 with gp2 volumes showing bursty latency. They need 12,000 IOPS and 800 MiB/s throughput for large sequential scans at minimal cost without paying for unused provisioned IOPS. Which block storage optimization meets the performance target at lowest cost?
• A video rendering farm with 300 EC2 workers runs nightly batch jobs for 8 hours with predictable CPU load, plus occasional daytime spikes for urgent client previews that must start immediately and can be interrupted. Finance demands the lowest cost for the predictable nightly baseline. What purchase mix is optimal?
• A global media startup serves Bedrock-powered video summarization from us-east-1, but European users cause costly cross-Region inference traffic and latency spikes during peak hours. The models are available in eu-west-1 and data residency allows EU processing. Which routing strategy optimizes data transfer costs for AI/ML workloads while preserving performance?
• A genomics lab runs nightly variant-calling pipelines for 6 hours on 200 vCPUs with sustained CPU pressure, plus event-driven image validations that run 400 ms 5 million times monthly. The budget was cut 25% and performance must stay constant while reducing compute and orchestration spend. What cost-optimized design helps?
• A platform team runs shared EKS clusters and Bedrock agents for 12 business units but bills everything to one account with no team-level visibility. Finance requires monthly chargeback by team for compute and separate Bedrock token usage by agent. Which chargeback and showback design allocates shared and AI costs to teams?
• A SaaS provider runs DynamoDB with spiky traffic, Aurora PostgreSQL with steady baseline plus high I/O, and RDS MySQL dev instances idle nights. They need lower bills without code changes. Which database cost optimization matches capacity models to each workload?
• A food-delivery platform orchestrates 12 million short order-status checks monthly, each workflow runs under 40 seconds with many Lambda transitions, and order APIs run on x86 EC2 at 65% CPU. Finance demands lower orchestration and compute bills without latency impact. Which cost-optimized architecture meets these workload requirements?
• A SaaS company runs 200 EC2 instances in private subnets across three AZs fetching data from S3 and DynamoDB through a single NAT gateway. Data transfer charges spiked, with cross-AZ traffic and NAT processing fees dominating. Which network design lowers data transfer and NAT costs while preserving private connectivity?
• A 400-person SaaS company runs 60 AWS accounts for three business units, 40 client projects, and dev, test, and prod environments, but finance cannot map spend and unallocated charges keep growing. Engineers forget tags and names vary by team. Which tagging strategy best establishes consistent cost allocation by business unit, project, and environment?
• A meal-kit company runs order APIs on EC2 Auto Scaling and Fargate services with sharp lunch peaks and idle nights. Finance demands lower cost without breaching p95 latency during surges. Which rightsizing and scaling mix is most effective?
• A SaaS provider runs production EC2 reporting servers with EBS volumes plus ephemeral dev EC2 instances. Finance requires 3-year audit retention for production only, monthly restore validation, and lower backup spend by moving old recovery points to cold tier while deleting dev backups after 14 days. Which backup retention design delivers cost-optimized recovery for this workload?
• A media company with 60 cost centers exceeds its quarterly cloud budget due to overnight transcoding spikes and needs team-level visibility, alerts at 80% spend, and detection of unusual service surges. Which cost monitoring and alerting solution provides budget thresholds and anomaly detection?
• A SaaS API sees weekday peaks, idle nights, and month-end batch spikes on ECS Fargate, with Compute Optimizer flagging 40% over-provisioned CPU and memory. Which rightsizing and scaling strategy best aligns cost with performance metrics?
• A media group with 30 linked accounts sees a 25% bill jump but cannot tell which service, team, or environment caused it and needs daily product-level trends plus ad-hoc chargeback data. Basic billing emails lack detail. Which cost reporting and analytics solution best provides this detailed billing visibility?
• A media firm serves personalized thumbnails from S3 and viewing history in DynamoDB to US and EU users, facing high inter-Region transfer bills from full replication of all buckets and tables. Only curated assets and active profiles need global access. Which replication design balances global performance with transfer cost?
• A SaaS startup runs nightly Bedrock on-demand calls to summarize 500k support tickets, with heavy repeated system prompts and a 6-hour latency tolerance. Costs spiked 4x and throughput is throttled at peak. Which Bedrock cost optimization for AI inference batching and caching should the architect select?
• A media company stores 800 TB of user-uploaded videos with unpredictable access patterns, some files become rarely accessed after 30 days, retrieval must remain in milliseconds when requested, and finance requires automatic cost reduction without application changes or retrieval fees. Which storage tiering design meets these access and cost requirements?
• A SaaS company ingests 3 TB of application logs daily into CloudWatch and keeps everything for a year, causing observability spend to exceed compute. Engineers need error diagnostics for 30 days and audit access for a year. Which cost-effective observability design with log filtering and retention optimization lowers cost?
• A SaaS enterprise with 80 AWS accounts needs mandatory owner and cost-center tags on EC2 and RDS, must block noncompliant launches and surface drift for finance chargeback. Which policy-based tagging design enforces cost allocation visibility?
• A media startup serves 2M Bedrock image prompts monthly with spiky traffic, repeated similar prompts, and nightly bulk tagging jobs. Inference cost is soaring while p95 latency remains flexible overnight. Which cost-optimized AI design lowers Bedrock spend while preserving quality?
• A database team runs a 2-TB PostgreSQL instance needing 12,000 IOPS with bursty throughput, costs have spiked on Provisioned IOPS volumes, performance must stay consistent, and they want independent scaling of IOPS and throughput without overprovisioning. Which block storage selection controls IOPS cost while meeting performance?
• A SaaS connects 40 VPCs to shared services, moving 30 TB monthly east-west with bursty inspection needs, debating Transit Gateway versus PrivateLink for service consumption. Which cost-effective network architecture considering Transit Gateway processing and PrivateLink pricing models minimizes data charges?
• A global streaming platform serves 20M requests daily from an ALB origin in one Region, seeing high origin load, cache misses on popular videos, and outages when the origin fails. Viewers span continents and demand low latency with resilient failover. Which content delivery design using origin selection caching and failover should the architect implement?
• A biotech firm runs steady-state genomics APIs on EC2 using 60% average CPU all year plus nightly batch jobs that tolerate interruptions and finish in 3 hours. Budgets are tight and availability matters for APIs. Which purchase option mix based on usage patterns minimizes cost while preserving availability?
• A global retailer serves product images from S3 and dynamic pricing from an ALB origin, suffers high origin load during sales, needs high cache hit ratios, reduced cross-region origin fetches, and automatic failover for static assets. Which content delivery design optimizes caching and origin resilience?
• A SaaS company has five product teams sharing AWS accounts, plus shared networking costs and growing Amazon Bedrock token spend per team. Finance requires monthly chargeback invoices that fairly distribute shared costs and Bedrock usage by team. Which cost allocation design delivers accurate team-level chargeback for this environment?
• A global support company runs Bedrock summarization in us-east-1 for agents in the US, EU, and APAC. Cross-Region prompt and attachment transfers are raising data-transfer and latency costs, and single-Region throttling causes retries. Which cross-Region inference routing strategy optimizes data transfer costs for AI workloads?
• A media workload uses DynamoDB with spiky viral traffic and Aurora PostgreSQL with steady production load plus high I/O reporting. Finance requires lower database spend without hurting bursts. Which database cost design aligns capacity modes and reserved capacity to each pattern?
• A media company processes 200 TB monthly between VPCs and S3 in one Region, but NAT gateway and cross-AZ charges are spiking. Traffic must stay private without internet egress, prefer same-AZ paths, and avoid inter-Region hops. Which network cost design reduces data transfer spend?
• An e-commerce company runs nightly 5-hour inventory reconciliation on x86 instances and processes order events through orchestrated workflows with millions of sub-second checks plus occasional multi-hour exception handling flows. Compute dominates the bill and transitions are charged per state change. Which pricing-model architecture minimizes cost for this workload mix?
• A SaaS platform spends heavily on NAT gateway processing and cross-AZ traffic between microservices and S3, needs private access to AWS services, regional data paths, and minimal inter-AZ charges without losing HA. Which network design optimizes data transfer costs?
• A media startup saw a 300% overnight cost spike from a runaway transcoding job and finance now requires immediate alerts on budget thresholds plus detection of unusual spend without static limits. Which cost monitoring and alerting design meets both threshold and anomaly requirements?
• An enterprise with 60 accounts cannot attribute $2M monthly spend to business units, projects, and environments. Teams use inconsistent tag spellings and billing shows unallocated costs. Finance needs enforceable chargeback by next quarter. Which tagging strategy for cost allocation provides accurate visibility?
• A regional insurer runs 400 EBS volumes and 25 RDS databases across two accounts. Finance requires 30 days of instant recovery, 1-year archive for compliance, and centralized backup reporting. Storage spend is 40% over budget. Which backup retention design delivers cost-optimized retention with AWS Backup and DLM?
• A SaaS analytics company runs a dashboard fleet on overprovisioned On-Demand EC2 instances behind an ALB. Traffic peaks 9am-5pm weekdays and is near idle nights and weekends. CPU averages 18% and Compute Optimizer flags overprovisioning. Which rightsizing and scaling strategy lowers cost while preserving daytime responsiveness?
• A photo platform stores 500 TB in us-east-1 S3 with only a curated /published/ prefix needed in eu-west-1 for local reads. It must keep EU latency low while cutting cross-Region transfer and storage spend. Which replication control provides cost-aware multi-Region access for this filtered dataset?
• A SaaS company has 25 spoke VPCs in one Region reading large datasets from Amazon S3 through NAT gateways and Transit Gateway, driving high processing charges. It must preserve private connectivity while cutting data transfer costs. Which network control creates the most cost-effective path for this S3 access?
• A media company stores 800 TB of video masters, project files on EFS, and rarely viewed archives with unpredictable re-access. Storage costs rose 40% while retrieval must stay automatic without code changes. Which storage optimization implements intelligent tiering and lifecycle policies?
• A support platform generates 2M Bedrock summarizations daily with many duplicate tickets, spiky daytime traffic, and repeated system prompts. Inference dominates the AWS bill and p95 latency rises during peaks. Which AI workload optimization combining tier selection, batching, and caching best cuts cost while meeting latency?
• A media firm stores 500 TB in us-east-1 S3 and DynamoDB session tables, must replicate only EU customer prefixes and active sessions to eu-west-1 while minimizing transfer and storage spend. Which cost-aware multi-Region replication design meets resilience with lowest cost?
• A media firm with 12 business units tags all resources by CostCenter but cannot explain monthly variances or allocate shared data-transfer costs. Finance needs hourly, resource-level history queryable by SQL and visual dashboards by team. Which cost reporting design using detailed billing data meets these needs?
• A fintech payments API generates 2 TB of JSON logs daily in CloudWatch and emits high-cardinality custom metrics. Engineers search only error traces for 30 days, compliance needs one year of immutable history, and debug fields inflate ingestion. CloudWatch bills doubled last quarter. Which cost-effective observability design using log filtering, metric aggregation, and retention optimization lowers these costs?