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SAA-C03 Practice Question 100: Instance Scheduler Dev Test Hours

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) · Test 10 · question 10 of 10

Compute Cost Optimizationmedium

A company runs development and test environments made up of standalone EC2 instances and RDS DB instances. Developers use them only from 08:00 to 18:00 on weekdays, but the resources run around the clock. The company wants to cut the cost of these non-production environments substantially without deleting anything or rewriting the applications.

Which solution is the MOST cost-effective and operationally simple?

Select one answer
Show answer and explanation

Answer:

  • C. Deploy Instance Scheduler on AWS and tag the resources with a schedule that stops them outside working hours

The environments are idle about 70 percent of the week (roughly 50 of 168 hours are in use), so the largest saving comes from stopping them when nobody uses them. Instance Scheduler on AWS is an AWS Solution that starts and stops EC2 and RDS instances on a schedule, driven by a tag on each resource. It works for standalone instances, leaves the resources and their storage in place, and needs no application changes.

Option A lowers the hourly rate but still pays for every hour, including the roughly 70 percent when nothing is in use. It also commits the company for a year to environments that may change.

Option B applies only to instances managed by an Auto Scaling group. The environments here are standalone EC2 and RDS instances, which scheduled scaling actions cannot stop.

Option D is not possible for the databases, since RDS does not offer Spot capacity. Spot instances can also be interrupted at any time, which would disrupt developers during working hours.

Reference: Instance Scheduler on AWS

Practice Test 10 ›

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