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SAA-C03 Practice Question 40: Compute Optimizer Rightsizing

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) · Test 4 · question 10 of 10

Compute Cost Optimizationeasy

A finance team reports that EC2 spend has grown faster than traffic. A sample of instances shows sustained CPU utilisation in the single digits and memory well below provisioned capacity. Before committing to any Savings Plan, leadership wants data-driven recommendations on which instances are over-provisioned and what they should be resized to.

Which service should the solutions architect use?

Select one answer
Show answer and explanation

Answer:

  • A. AWS Compute Optimizer, which analyses utilisation metrics and recommends optimal instance types

Compute Optimizer analyses historical CloudWatch utilisation for EC2 instances, Auto Scaling groups, EBS volumes and Lambda functions, classifies each resource as over-provisioned, under-provisioned or optimised, and recommends specific instance types with projected performance and cost impact. That is precisely the "which instances and what should they be" question leadership asked, and doing it before buying a commitment avoids locking in spend on capacity that is about to be resized away.

Option B looks at the wrong thing. Trusted Advisor's service limit checks report quota headroom; its cost checks flag idle resources but do not produce right-sizing recommendations with target instance types.

Option C reports on spend after the fact. A budget alert says the bill crossed a threshold and offers no analysis of which instances are oversized.

Option D recommends a purchase commitment for the current footprint. Buying a Savings Plan sized to over-provisioned instances is the mistake leadership is explicitly trying to avoid.

Reference: What is AWS Compute Optimizer?

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