AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate SAA-C03 Practice Test 88
Question 870
An organization holds many years of AWS Backup recovery points. Most are retained for compliance but expected to be restored rarely. Backup copies may support cold archival for the selected resource. What optimization is valid?
- Apply cold storage to every recovery point and assume all AWS Backup resource types support identical lifecycle modes.
- Evaluate supported AWS Backup cold-storage transitions and retention while ensuring required recovery RTO and resource eligibility.
- Reduce every retained recovery point to one day despite an eight-year compliance rule.
- Store the only recovery copy on a transient instance-store disk to avoid vault charges.
Explanation
Correct Answer
B:Eligible backup types can have differentiated lifecycle economics; unsupported cold transitions or slow restore behavior can break recovery policy.
Incorrect Answers
A:Cold backup support and transition constraints depend on resource and backup type.
C:A low bill is not valid if legally required recovery history is destroyed.
D:Ephemeral host storage cannot satisfy long-lived independent recovery.
Question 871
A backup vault holds daily manual snapshots long after an automated backup strategy replaced them. No one manages stale restore points and storage costs keep increasing. Which correction balances recovery with cost?
- Apply a one-day deletion rule to every manual restore point before verifying legal holds, restore tests and historical recovery requirements.
- Move manual snapshots into a second backup vault and retain both vaults permanently without reducing overlapping restore points.
- Set explicit retention/lifecycle policies and decommission confirmed unneeded backup copies after dependency and legal review.
- Replicate each existing snapshot to more Regions while keeping all stale source snapshots indefinitely.
Explanation
Correct Answer
C:Set a documented retention and recovery-point policy, validate restore dependencies and holds, and delete or expire only proven unnecessary backups. AWS Backup lifecycle and supported backup-vault policies can automate future retention discipline.
Incorrect Answers
A:A blanket expiration policy can remove the only recovery point needed for a delayed corruption or compliance period.
B:Copying all snapshots creates additional retained backup capacity and does not solve duplicated retention policy.
D:Additional copies can improve specified disaster recovery but enlarge costs when retention and required recovery boundaries are not measured.
Question 872
A DR strategy replicates every short-lived scratch-volume backup to three Regions, although the contract only requires cross-account restoration of customer records in one standby Region. What is the cost-aware correction?
- Keep copying every short-lived scratch backup to three Regions; backup copies are a primary reliability control regardless of the stated business recovery scope.
- Reduce cost by keeping only transient scratch copies in the standby Region and dropping the contractually required customer-records backups.
- Keep all existing copy destinations but apply a shorter lifecycle to customer records, even though those records require cross-account recovery for the contractual period.
- Use selectively scoped backup plans to preserve customer records across the required account and Region boundary, while omitting reconstructible scratch data from unnecessary copies.
Explanation
Correct Answer
D:Business-critical customer records must remain restorable from the specified separate account and standby Region. Removing redundant copies of disposable scratch limits cost without compromising the required failure boundary.
Incorrect Answers
A:Replication across more Regions can improve recovery options, but it consumes storage, requests and cross-Region movement that may not be justified for regenerable scratch. Scope should follow business recovery obligations.
B:The contractual objective specifies restoration of customer records, not temporary scratch. Removing the required records from the recovery location directly breaks the intended recovery design.
C:Shortening the retention of protected records to match scratch-data lifetime would undermine the stated retention and recovery requirement, even if it reduces storage spend.
Question 873
A company wants to know which product team causes high S3, EFS and EBS spending. Costs are mixed across a shared payer account and resources lack owners. What chargeback practice should it adopt?
- Use supported AWS cost allocation tags or linked-account attribution and validate that the billing data carries these dimensions.
- Activate cost-allocation tags on S3 but assign EBS and EFS resources to a shared untagged pool and divide the rest equally.
- Rely on IAM principal tags from engineers who created resources as automatic billing tags, without tagging the billable storage resources.
- Use a monthly billing total without resource IDs or activated team tags, and infer ownership from the largest department headcount.
Explanation
Correct Answer
A:Activate and consistently apply supported resource cost-allocation tags or use account boundaries; verify CUR/Data Exports or Cost Explorer includes the chosen dimensions for S3, EFS and EBS and reconcile shared-cost exceptions.
Incorrect Answers
B:A partially tagged estate still leaves major resource costs unattributed. Cost dimensions need consistent supported tags or account boundaries across storage services.
C:IAM principal attributes do not automatically become active cost-allocation tags on every created bucket, volume or file system; billing activation and resource tagging matter.
D:Unattributed aggregate spending cannot reliably identify which resource or product team incurred each storage cost.
Question 874
A storage-finance team must identify the exact S3 object keys older than 180 days in a large bucket and compare their storage class, size and encryption metadata before deciding whether to change lifecycle rules. Aggregate Storage Lens bucket totals are insufficient, and repeated live ListObjects API scans are too disruptive. A scheduled one-day or weekly report is acceptable. Which data source fits?
- Use S3 Storage Lens free-tier bucket totals alone, because aggregated object count and byte metrics enumerate every object key and its encryption status.
- Configure S3 Inventory with required object metadata columns and daily or weekly CSV, ORC or Parquet delivery, then query the inventory reports using Athena.
- Enable S3 Transfer Acceleration to create a queryable historical report of object last-modified timestamps and storage classes without inventory generation.
- Turn on CloudFront access logs and treat cached HTTP requests as an authoritative object-key inventory of the entire source S3 bucket.
Explanation
Correct Answer
B:S3 Inventory produces scheduled object-level reports in supported formats, with configurable metadata fields such as storage class, size and encryption status. Athena can query the reports to find candidate objects without repeatedly listing the live bucket.
Incorrect Answers
A:S3 Storage Lens helps analyze aggregate storage trends but its standard bucket-level metrics do not substitute for an exact per-object metadata manifest.
C:Transfer Acceleration optimizes supported upload/download network paths. It does not create S3 object inventories or historical metadata datasets.
D:CloudFront logs reflect viewer/cache traffic, not every object present in S3; cold or never-requested objects would be missed.
Question 875
A company consistently overshoots its S3 budget but only notices on invoice day. The owners want warnings during the month when accumulated spend approaches approved storage limits. What AWS facility helps?
- Depend solely on monthly invoices because AWS offers no spend notifications before billing closes.
- Use CloudFront invalidation charges as the only signal of total S3 storage expense.
- Configure AWS Budgets thresholds and notifications for suitable storage-related cost categories or scoped workloads.
- Delete every S3 object when a CPU alarm fires without cost-owner review.
Explanation
Correct Answer
C:Budget alerts can notify stakeholders before a monthly total surpasses the agreed threshold.
Incorrect Answers
A:AWS Budgets can monitor spending against a budget and send configured alerts before a final monthly invoice arrives. Waiting only for billed statements forfeits earlier opportunities to correct an unexpected storage-cost trend.
B:Invalidation usage is not a direct proxy for stored-byte spending.
D:CPU changes do not identify which stored data is unnecessary or permitted to expire.
Question 876
A cost manager claims transitioning a bucket to IA will save 60% per month, but never examined S3 request charges, retrievals or data transfer. Which AWS data should inform the estimate?
- Compare only S3 Standard and IA listed $/GiB rates and assume request frequency is irrelevant.
- Assume AWS data-transfer costs always disappear when storage classes change.
- Use CloudTrail sign-in events as a direct substitute for S3 storage-class and request charge line items.
- Use Cost Explorer and suitable detailed billing exports to distinguish class, stored capacity, requests, retrieval and transfer charges.
Explanation
Correct Answer
D:A lower storage rate can be offset by other billed dimensions, so historical workload-specific expense must be modeled.
Incorrect Answers
A:Request/retrieval and minimum-duration costs materially affect the total.
B:Storage class selection does not by itself eliminate network movement charges.
C:Audit events do not fully price bucket utilization and data transfer.
Question 877
A retailer expects a two-week promotion that doubles EC2 demand, after which the experimental service may shut down entirely. Its finance team proposes a three-year fixed commitment for the entire temporary peak. Which billing choice limits commitment risk?
- Use On-Demand capacity for the uncertain burst, with scaling to remove it afterward.
- Buy a three-year fixed commitment equal to the one-time peak without baseline-use evidence.
- Purchase dedicated capacity for the entire peak permanently because On-Demand cannot run temporary instances.
- Leave promotion instances running after traffic stops so unused capacity is always cheaper.
Explanation
Correct Answer
A:On-Demand is flexible for short or unpredictable usage without buying a long-lived financial commitment for disposable peak capacity.
Incorrect Answers
B:Long contracts can leave unused covered spend after the promotion ends.
C:On-Demand instances support temporary elastic demand, subject to capacity and quotas.
D:Idle EC2 instances still incur applicable running-instance charges. If promotional traffic has ended and no ongoing capacity is required, scheduled termination or controlled scale-in can avoid those unused compute hours.
Question 878
An ecommerce EC2 fleet scales from 12 instances to 90 during lunch peaks, but an operator manually leaves all 90 running overnight. Low-traffic requests can be served by 12. What cost control should replace this?
- Purchase Reserved Instances for the whole 90-host peak fleet and keep all of those EC2 instances running overnight.
- Use EC2 Auto Scaling policies that scale out and scale in with demand while maintaining the safe baseline.
- Configure the Auto Scaling group with scale-out alarms but no scale-in policy or capacity reset after lunch.
- Schedule shutdown of individual Auto Scaling-managed instances nightly without reducing desired capacity.
Explanation
Correct Answer
B:Use EC2 Auto Scaling target tracking, scheduled capacity or appropriately controlled scale-in/out policies to follow load and retain the 12-node safe baseline. Scaling in eliminates avoidable peak-instance hours after lunchtime demand subsides.
Incorrect Answers
A:A financial discount might lower some hourly rates but does not remove idle provisioned instance hours. It can create excess long-term commitment for an intermittent peak.
C:Scale-out alone handles rising traffic but leaves the group overprovisioned after demand falls.
D:An Auto Scaling group can replace manually stopped or terminated instances to restore its unchanged desired capacity, so this does not reliably reclaim the idle fleet.
Question 879
An AWS organization has hundreds of EC2 instances and Fargate workloads across accounts. Teams independently recommend terminating idle instances, rightsizing those same instances, and buying Savings Plans for their current usage. Finance finds that summing all advertised savings would double-count mutually exclusive actions, and existing commitments affect real savings. Which AWS feature best consolidates and prioritizes defensible, overlapping cost-optimization opportunities?
- Create only AWS Budgets alerts for each account and add their alert thresholds as realized projected savings.
- Enable cost allocation tags on EC2 instances and assume tags automatically de-duplicate rightsizing, idle-deletion and commitment savings.
- Enable AWS Cost Optimization Hub across the organization and review its aggregated, de-duplicated recommendations and commercial-term-aware estimated savings before implementing changes.
- Purchase every recommended Savings Plan and Reserved Instance first and then terminate all idle resources, counting the highest reported saving for every independent suggestion.
Explanation
Correct Answer
C:Cost Optimization Hub aggregates recommendations across accounts/Regions and considers existing Savings Plans and Reserved Instances. It de-duplicates overlapping potential savings, letting teams prioritize feasible actions and validate their performance impact.
Incorrect Answers
A:AWS Budgets can monitor spend and trigger alerts, but budget thresholds are not estimated savings opportunities and do not reconcile mutually exclusive actions.
B:Tags help attribute costs to workloads but do not identify, rank or de-duplicate savings estimates for overlapping deletion, rightsizing and commitment choices.
D:Buying commitments for resources that are later deleted can waste commitment coverage. Summing mutually exclusive recommendations overstates realizable savings; the sequencing must account for future usage and discounts.
Question 880
A production web tier runs one EC2 family in one Region at near-full baseline utilization year-round. The organization accepts a one- or three-year spend commitment for a larger discount and is confident in that family/region. Which pricing instrument merits comparison?
- Use On-Demand alone because long, predictable usage never benefits from discounted commitments.
- Use a Compute Savings Plan only because it is always strictly more discounted than a narrower Instance Savings Plan.
- Purchase Spot for all noninterruptible baseline capacity with no fallback as if interruption were impossible.
- Evaluate an EC2 Instance Savings Plan matching the eligible family/Region usage and term.
Explanation
Correct Answer
D:Instance Savings Plans exchange narrower usage flexibility for a potentially higher discount when the workload shape is stable.
Incorrect Answers
A:Predictable eligible usage can justify a commitment after financial modeling.
B:Compute plans generally offer broader flexibility, with different discount tradeoffs.
C:Spot capacity is reclaimable and may not meet continuous critical service obligations alone.