Design Cost-Optimized Architectures

A company runs a production Aurora MySQL cluster. To meet an internal policy, the team set the automated backup retention period to the maximum 35 days and also created hundreds of manual snapshots over the past year that are never deleted. The finance team notices rising 'backup storage' charges on the monthly bill. Auditors only require the ability to restore data from the last 7 days. Which action will MOST effectively reduce backup storage costs while still meeting the audit requirement?

A company runs an internal expense-reporting application that is used heavily for a few hours at the end of each month but sees almost no traffic for the remaining three weeks. The application uses a MySQL-compatible relational database. Currently they pay for a provisioned Amazon Aurora instance running 24/7, and finance has flagged the database as a major source of wasted spend. The team wants to minimize cost while keeping full relational capabilities and automatically matching capacity to the unpredictable monthly spikes. Which approach is the MOST cost-effective?

A media company hosts a popular photo-sharing website. Static images are stored in an Amazon S3 bucket and served directly to millions of users worldwide. The finance team reports that S3 data transfer out to the internet has become the single largest line item on the monthly bill, because the same popular images are downloaded repeatedly by users across many Regions. Which change will MOST effectively reduce the data transfer costs?

A company runs a serverless data-processing pipeline built on hundreds of AWS Lambda functions. The finance team reports that Lambda charges have grown steadily, and engineers suspect many functions are configured with more memory than they actually need. The team wants a low-effort, data-driven way to identify functions whose memory allocation could be reduced to lower cost without impacting performance. Which approach best meets this requirement?

A company runs a fleet of 40 On-Demand EC2 instances hosting an internal application. Finance reports the monthly EC2 bill is high, and the operations team suspects the instances were oversized during initial deployment. Average CPU utilization sits around 8% and memory usage around 20%. The team wants specific, data-driven recommendations on which instance types to move to, based on actual historical usage, before making any changes. Which AWS service should they use to obtain these recommendations at the lowest effort?

A company runs a stable production workload on EC2 that will require compute for the next three years. The team currently uses a mix of M5 instances but expects to migrate portions of the workload to Fargate and possibly switch to newer instance families as they become available. They want the lowest possible commitment-based discount while retaining maximum flexibility to change instance families, sizes, and even move to Fargate without losing their discount. Which purchasing option best meets these requirements?

A company runs a consistent baseline of production workloads that has remained stable for over a year, spread across EC2 (mixed instance families), AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda. Finance wants to reduce compute costs on this predictable baseline while retaining the flexibility to change instance families, sizes, and even move some workloads between EC2 and Fargate over the next three years. Which purchasing option BEST meets these requirements?

A company runs a steady production workload on EC2 that has been stable for over a year, but leadership expects to change instance families within the 3-year commitment period as the application is re-architected. They want maximum discount for the committed baseline while retaining the ability to exchange the reservation for a different instance family later. Which purchasing option best meets these requirements?

A company runs a mix of steady-state EC2 workloads and several RDS databases across multiple accounts under AWS Organizations. Finance has asked the solutions architect to identify where the company is paying full On-Demand rates that could be reduced through commitment-based discounts, and to see recommendations tailored to their historical usage before making any purchase. Which AWS tool should the architect use to obtain these purchase recommendations?

A company's monthly AWS bill has grown steadily over the past year. The finance team asks the solutions architect to identify concrete opportunities to reduce spend, including underutilized EC2 instances, potential Savings Plans purchases, and unusual cost trends broken down by service and linked account. The architect wants a single native tool that provides historical cost analysis, forecasting, and rightsizing recommendations. Which AWS service should the architect use?

A company runs a chatty microservices application on EC2 across three Availability Zones in a single Region. The services exchange large volumes of traffic with each other continuously. The finance team notices a large and growing line item for inter-AZ data transfer on the monthly bill. The architecture must remain highly available, but the team wants to reduce these data transfer costs. Which approach best reduces the inter-AZ transfer charges while preserving availability?

A media company runs an analytics application on EC2 instances in the us-east-1 Region. The application reads roughly 40 TB of raw video metadata per month from an S3 bucket. The team initially created the S3 bucket in the eu-west-1 Region because that is where the data was first uploaded, but all compute now runs in us-east-1. The finance team has flagged rising data transfer charges. Which action will MOST cost-effectively reduce these charges while keeping the analytics workload unchanged?

A financial services company runs a hybrid architecture and currently connects its on-premises data center to AWS using a single Site-to-Site VPN over the public internet. Over the past year, data transfer to AWS has grown to a sustained 2 TB per day, and the company reports that the per-GB data transfer charges plus inconsistent throughput are causing both budget overruns and application latency complaints. Management wants the most cost-effective long-term solution that reduces per-GB data transfer costs and provides predictable bandwidth. What should the solutions architect recommend?

A company runs a production DynamoDB table using provisioned capacity mode. After six months of monitoring with CloudWatch, the team confirms the table consistently consumes a stable, predictable baseline of read and write capacity units around the clock with very little variation. The finance team wants to reduce the ongoing cost of this table without changing the application or its performance characteristics. Which approach is the MOST cost-effective?

A company runs a fleet of EC2 instances with 500 GB gp2 EBS volumes attached to each. After analyzing CloudWatch metrics, the operations team finds that each volume only stores about 120 GB of data, uses less than 500 IOPS on average, and never exceeds 50 MB/s of throughput. The team wants to reduce EBS storage costs while maintaining current performance. What is the MOST cost-effective action?

A company purchased three-year Standard Reserved Instances for a fleet of m5.xlarge EC2 instances to support a large internal application. Eighteen months into the term, the business unit that owned the application was shut down, and those instances are no longer needed. The finance team wants to recover as much of the remaining commitment as possible without incurring ongoing charges for unused capacity. Which action provides the MOST cost-effective outcome?

A media company runs a fleet of EC2 instances that must operate 24/7 to serve a critical, always-on transcoding API. Usage has been steady for over a year and is forecast to remain flat for the next three years. The company wants the lowest possible cost for this baseline compute without any risk of instances being reclaimed. Which pricing approach best meets these requirements?

A startup runs a session-caching layer on a self-managed ElastiCache for Redis cluster with two large node types provisioned 24/7. Traffic is very low overnight and on weekends but spikes unpredictably during weekday marketing campaigns. The finance team wants to stop paying for idle capacity while still handling sudden spikes without manual intervention. Which change best optimizes cost for this pattern?

A media company runs a nightly video transcoding pipeline on Amazon ECS. Each job is stateless, writes output directly to Amazon S3, and can safely be restarted from the beginning if interrupted. The batch of jobs currently runs on ECS tasks backed by On-Demand Fargate capacity, and finance has asked the team to reduce the compute cost of this pipeline as much as possible without managing any EC2 infrastructure. Which approach best meets these requirements?

A startup runs a small development VPC where private-subnet EC2 instances only occasionally need outbound internet access to download OS package updates a few times per week. The team currently uses a NAT gateway and is surprised by the recurring hourly charges plus data processing fees, even though actual traffic is minimal. They want to reduce cost while still allowing outbound-only internet access, and they accept slightly lower availability and some management overhead for this non-production environment. Which approach BEST reduces cost for this workload?