Chapter 13 - Cost-Optimized Architectures

Question 1

Which of the following best describes the AWS Free Tier?

A) Free access to AWS services for a new account’s first month

B) Free access to all instance types of AWS EC2 instances for new accounts

C) Free access to basic levels of AWS services for a new account’s first year

D) Unlimited and open-ended access to the “free tier” of most AWS services

Answer 1

C. The Free Tier provides free access to basic levels of AWS services for a new account’s
first year.

Question 2

Which of the following storage classes provides the least expensive storage and transfer rates?

A) Amazon S3 Glacier

B) Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access

C) Amazon S3 Standard

D) Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access

Answer 2

A. Standard provides the most replicated and quickest-access service and is, therefore, the
most expensive option. Storage rates for Standard-Infrequent and One Zone-Infrequent are
lower than Standard but are still more expensive than Glacier.

Question 3

Which AWS service is best suited to controlling your spending by sending email alerts?

A) Cost Explorer

B) Budgets

C) Organizations

D) TCO Calculator

Answer 3

B. Cost Explorer provides usage and spending data. Organizations lets you combine multiple
AWS accounts under a single administration. TCO Calculator would let you compare the
costs of running an application on AWS versus locally, but it no longer exists.

Question 4

Your AWS infrastructure is growing and you’re beginning to have trouble keeping track of
what you’re spending. Which AWS service is best suited to analyzing account usage data
at scale?

A) Trusted Advisor

B) Cost Explorer

C) Budgets

D) Cost and Usage Reports

Answer 4

D. Cost Explorer provides usage and spending data, but without the ability to easily incorporate Redshift and QuickSight that Cost and Usage Reports offers. Trusted Advisor checks
your account for best-practice compliance. Budgets allows you to set alerts for problematic usage

Question 5

Your company wants to more closely coordinate the administration of its multiple AWS
accounts, and AWS Organizations can help it do that. How does that change your security
profile? (Choose three.)

A) An organization-level administration account breach is potentially more damaging.

B) User permissions can be controlled centrally at the organization level.

C) You should upgrade to use only specially hardened organization-level VPCs.

D) Standard security best practices such as MFA and strong passwords are even more
essential.

E) You should upgrade all of your existing security groups to account for the changes.

Answer 5

A, B, D. As efficient as Organizations can be, so does the threat they represent grow. There is
no such thing as a specially hardened organization-level VPC. Security groups don’t require
any special configuration.

Question 6

Which of the following resource states are monitored by AWS Trusted Advisor?
(Choose two.)

A) Route 53 routing failures

B) Running but idle EC2 instances

C) S3 buckets with public read access permissions

D) EC2 Linux instances that allow root account SSH access

E) Unencrypted S3 bucket data transfers

Answer 6

B, C. Trusted Advisor monitors your EC2 instances for lower than 10 percent CPU and
network I/O below 5 MB on four or more days. Trusted Advisor doesn’t monitor Route
53 hosted zones or the status of S3 data transfers. Proper OS-level configuration of your
EC2 instances is your responsibility.

Question 7

You’re planning a new AWS deployment, and your team is debating whether they’ll be better
off using an RDS database or one run on an EC2 instance. Which of the following tools will
be most helpful?

A) TCO Calculator

B) AWS Pricing Calculator

C) Trusted Advisor

D) Cost and Usage Reports

Answer 7

B. The Pricing Calculator is the most direct tool for this kind of calculation. TCO Calculator
helps you compare costs of on-premises to AWS deployments. Trusted Advisor checks your
account for best-practice compliance. Cost and Usage Reports help you analyze data from an
existing deployment.

Question 8

Which of the following is not a metric you can configure an AWS budget to track?

A) EBS volume capacity

B) Resource usage

C) Reserve instance coverage

D) Resource cost

Answer 8

A. Monitoring of EBS volumes for capacity is not within the scope of budgets.

Question 9

Which of the following statements are true of cost allocation tags? (Choose two.)

A) Tags can take up to 24 hours before they appear in the Billing and Cost Management
dashboard.

B) Tags can’t be applied to resources that were launched before the tags were created.

C) You’re allowed five free budgets per account.

D) You can activate and manage cost allocation tags from the Tag Editor page.

Answer 9

A, B. Tags can take up to 24 hours to appear and they can’t be applied to legacy resources.
You’re actually allowed only two free budgets per account. Cost allocation tags are managed
from the Cost Allocation Tags page.

Question 10

Your online web store normally requires three EC2 instances to handle traffic but experiences
a twofold increase in traffic for the two summer months. Which of the following approaches
makes the most sense?

A) Run three on-demand instances 12 months per year and schedule six reserve instances
for the summer months.

B) Run three spot instances for the summer months and three reserve instances
12 months/year.

C) Run nine reserve instances for 12 months/year.

D) Run three reserve instances 12 months/year and purchase three scheduled reserve
instances for the summer months.

Answer 10

D. The most effective approach would be to run three reserve instances 12 months/year and
purchase three scheduled reserve instances for the summer. Spot instances are not appropriate
because they shut down automatically. Since it’s possible to schedule an RI to launch within
a recurring block of time, provisioning other instance configurations for the summer months
will be wasteful.

Question 11

Which of the following settings do you not need to provide when configuring a reserved
instance?

A) Payment option

B) Standard or Convertible RI

C) Interruption policy

D) Tenancy

Answer 11

C. Interruption polices are relevant to spot instances, not reserved instances. Payment
options (All Upfront, Partial Upfront, or No Upfront), reservation types (Standard or Convertible RI), and tenancy (Default or Dedicated) are all necessary settings for RIs.

Question 12

Your new web application requires multiple EC2 instances running 24/7 and you’re going to
purchase reserved instances. Which of the following payment options is the most expensive
when configuring a reserve instance?

A) All Upfront

B) Partial Upfront

C) No Upfront

D) Monthly

Answer 12

C. No Upfront is the most expensive option. The more you pay up front, the lower the
overall cost. There’s no option called Monthly.

Question 13

Which of the following benefits of containers such as Docker can significantly reduce your
AWS compute costs? (Choose two.)

A) Containers can launch quickly.

B) Containers can deliver increased server density.

C) Containers make it easy to reliably replicate server environments.

D) Containers can run using less memory than physical machines.

Answer 13

B, D. Containers are more dense and lightweight. Containers do tend to launch more quickly
than EC2 instances and do make it easy to replicate server environments, but those are not
primarily cost savings.

Question 14

Which of the following is the best use of an EC2 reserved instance?

A) An application that will run continuously for six months straight

B) An application that will run continuously for 36 months straight

C) An application that runs only during local business hours

D) An application that runs at unpredictable times and can survive unexpected shutdowns

Answer 14

B. Standard reserve instances make the most sense when they need to be available 24/7 for at
least a full year, with even greater savings over three years. Irregular or partial workdays are
not good candidates for this pricing model.

Question 15

Which of the following describes “unused EC2 instances matching a particular set of launch
specifications”?

A) Request type

B) Spot instance interruption

C) Spot fleet

D) Spot instance pool

Answer 15

D. A spot instance pool is made up of unused EC2 instances. There are three request types:
Request, Request And Maintain, and Reserve For Duration. A spot instance interruption occurs when the spot price rises above your maximum. A spot fleet is a group of spot
instances launched together.

Question 16

Which of the following best describes a spot instance interruption?

A) A spot instance interruption occurs when the spot price rises above your maximum.

B) A spot instance interruption is the termination of a spot instance when its workload
completes.

C) A spot instance interruption occurs when a spot request is manually restarted.

D) A spot instance interruption is the result of a temporary outage in an AWS datacenter.

Answer 16

A. A spot instance interruption occurs when the spot price rises above your maximum.
Workload completions and datacenter outages are never referred to as interruptions. Spot
requests can’t be manually restarted.

Question 17

Which of the following describes the maximum instances or vCPUs you want running?

A) Spot instance pool

B) Target capacity

C) Spot maximum

D) Spot cap

Answer 17

B. Target capacity represents the maximum instances you want running. A spot instance
pool contains unused EC2 instances matching a particular set of launch specifications. Spot
maximum and spot cap sound good but aren’t terms normally used in this context.

Question 18

You need to make sure your EBS volumes are regularly backed up, but you’re afraid you’ll
forget to remove older snapshot versions, leading to expensive data bloat. What’s the best
solution to this problem?

A) Configure the EBS Lifecycle Manager.

B) Create a script that will regularly invoke the AWS CLI to prune older snapshots.

C) Configure an EBS Scheduled Reserved Instance.

D) Tie a string to your finger.

E) Configure an S3 Lifecycle configuration policy to remove old snapshots.

Answer 18

A. The EBS Lifecycle Manager can be configured to remove older EBS snapshots according
to your needs. Creating a script is possible, but it’s nowhere near as simple, and it’s not
tightly integrated with your AWS infrastructure. There is no “EBS Scheduled Reserve Instance” but there is an “EC2 Scheduled Reserve Instance.” Tying a string? Really? EBS snapshots are stored in S3, but you can’t access the buckets that they’re kept in.

Question 19

Which of these AWS CLI commands will launch a spot fleet?

A) aws ec2 request-fleet –spot-fleet-request-config file://
Config.json

B) aws ec2 spot-fleet –spot-fleet-request-config file://
Config.json

C) aws ec2 launch-spot-fleet –spot-fleet-request-config/ file://
Config.json

D) aws ec2 request-spot-fleet –spot-fleet-request-config/ file://
Config.json

Answer 19

D. The command is request-spot-fleet. The –spot-fleet-request-config
argument points to a JSON configuration file.

Question 20

Which of the following elements is not something you’d include in your spot fleet request?

A) Availability zone

B) Target capacity

C) Platform (the instance OS)

D) AMI

Answer 20

C. The availability zone, target capacity, and AMI are all elements of a complete spot fleet
request.