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SAA-C03 Practice Question 49: Graviton Price Performance

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) · Test 5 · question 9 of 10

Compute Cost Optimizationeasy

A stateless Java web tier runs on x86 EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. The team wants to cut compute cost without reducing capacity or accepting interruptions, and without committing to a long-term purchase plan. The application's dependencies are all available for the arm64 architecture, and the deployment pipeline can build a second image.

What should the solutions architect recommend?

Select one answer
Show answer and explanation

Answer:

  • B. Migrate the tier to AWS Graviton-based instances, which offer better price performance for equivalent capacity

Graviton processors are AWS's Arm-based silicon, designed to deliver better price performance than comparable x86 instances for general-purpose workloads like a Java web tier. Because the stem establishes that the dependencies support arm64 and the pipeline can produce a second image, the migration is a build-target change rather than an application rewrite. It reduces cost per unit of capacity with no commitment and no interruption risk, which is what the constraints ask for.

Option A trades cost for exactly the interruption risk the requirements exclude. Spot capacity can be reclaimed at two minutes' notice.

Option C is the long-term commitment the team ruled out, and a three-year All Upfront term is the least flexible form of it, locking in the current instance family before the cheaper architecture has been evaluated.

Option D rearranges the same total capacity. Fewer, larger instances cost roughly the same per unit of compute and reduce resilience by putting more of the tier on each host.

Reference: AWS Graviton Processor

Practice Test 5 ›

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