CLF-C02 Practice Question 20: Consolidated Billing
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) · Test 2 · question 10 of 10
Three departments each have their own standalone AWS account, and each stores about 20 TB in Amazon S3 Standard. Because S3 storage is priced in tiers, each account pays the highest-priced tier for its first terabyte every month. The company wants a lower total storage bill without changing where or how the data is stored. What should it do?
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Answer:
With consolidated billing in AWS Organizations, AWS treats all accounts in the organization as a single account when measuring usage for tiered pricing. Member accounts no longer reach tier thresholds individually. Instead, their usage is aggregated for each service, so the most expensive tier is charged once for the organization rather than once per account, and the combined 60 TB reaches lower-priced tiers sooner. Consolidated billing also shares Reserved Instance and Savings Plans discounts across accounts, produces one bill, and costs nothing extra.
Option A sounds plausible because reservations discount EC2 and RDS, but S3 Standard storage has no reserved capacity to purchase. Option B, cost allocation tags, helps you track and attribute spending in billing reports; tags do not change the rate you pay. Option D changes how the data is stored; Intelligent-Tiering moves objects between access tiers based on access patterns and adds a per-object monitoring charge, which breaks the stem's constraint, and it does nothing to combine the three accounts' volume.
References: Consolidating billing for AWS Organizations; Understanding Consolidated Bills