4 of the 4 questions we have for this objective, shown with the answer and the reasoning.
Determine cost optimization and visibility strategies
Merriton Software spends a steady $60 per hour on compute across 120 accounts: EC2 instances in the C6i and M6i families in us-east-1 and eu-west-1, Amazon ECS tasks on AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda functions. Over the next year the company plans to move most EC2 workloads to Graviton-based C7g and M7g instances and to shift some services from EC2 to Fargate. It wants a three-year commitment that maximizes savings on this steady baseline without restricting these migrations, and it wants the discount to apply across all accounts.
Which purchasing approach should the solutions architect recommend?
- APurchase EC2 Instance Savings Plans for the C6i and M6i families in each Region.EC2 Instance Savings Plans are tied to an instance family in a Region, so the discount would stop applying when workloads move to C7g and M7g or to Fargate.
- BPurchase Compute Savings Plans for the baseline hourly commitment in the management account, keep Reserved Instance and Savings Plans discount sharing turned on, and cover spikes with On-Demand or Spot capacity.Compute Savings Plans apply to EC2 in any family, size, Region and operating system, and to Fargate and Lambda. With discount sharing on, the commitment benefits usage in all accounts of the organization.
- CPurchase Convertible Reserved Instances for the current instances and exchange them when workloads move to Graviton.Convertible RIs can be exchanged, but they apply only to EC2, so Fargate and Lambda usage would get no discount, and each exchange is an operational task.
- DPurchase Standard Reserved Instances for the current instances because they offer the highest discount.Standard RIs cannot be exchanged for other families, so they would be stranded after the Graviton migration, and they do not cover Fargate or Lambda.
Why: Purchasing options trade discount depth for flexibility. EC2 Instance Savings Plans and Standard RIs give the highest discounts but lock in a family and Region, which conflicts with planned migrations. Compute Savings Plans give a slightly lower discount but apply automatically across EC2 families, Regions, Fargate and Lambda, so they keep saving money while the architecture changes. In an organization with discount sharing enabled, a commitment bought in one account applies to eligible usage in other accounts.
Determine cost optimization and visibility strategies
Quarrington Games has 70 accounts grouped into cost categories for its five studios. Spending varies widely week to week with game launches, so fixed monthly thresholds either fire constantly or miss problems. Last month a misconfigured job in one studio's account ran up $40,000 in NAT gateway data processing over three days before anyone noticed. Finance wants each studio lead to be alerted within about a day of unusual spend for that studio, without maintaining thresholds by hand.
Which solution should the solutions architect recommend?
- ACreate an AWS Budgets cost budget for each studio with a fixed monthly limit and an alert at 80%.Fixed budgets need thresholds that the company says do not fit its variable spend, and a monthly limit may not be reached until long after a spike starts.
- BCreate a CloudWatch billing alarm on the EstimatedCharges metric for each account.Billing alarms use static thresholds and must be maintained for 70 accounts, which is the manual tuning finance wants to avoid.
- CConfigure AWS Cost Anomaly Detection with a cost category monitor for the studio categories and alert subscriptions that send individual alerts to each studio lead through Amazon SNS.Cost Anomaly Detection uses machine learning to learn each studio's normal spending pattern and flags unusual spend with root cause details, such as the service and account, without fixed thresholds.
- DHave a FinOps analyst review the Cost Explorer daily cost graph for each studio every morning.Manual review does not scale, depends on one person, and is not an automated alert to studio leads.
Why: Different AWS cost tools fit different monitoring needs. AWS Budgets is best for known targets and forecasts, while AWS Cost Anomaly Detection is best for variable spend where unusual patterns matter more than a fixed limit. Anomaly monitors can be scoped by service, linked account, cost category or cost allocation tag, and alert subscriptions send individual alerts or summaries to email or SNS. Pairing anomaly detection with budgets gives both early warning and plan tracking.
Determine cost optimization and visibility strategies
Ashby Media's FinOps team needs hourly, resource-level cost and usage data for all 200 accounts in its organization, including user-defined cost allocation tags and the amortized cost of Savings Plans. Analysts want to join the data with internal project tables in SQL and build Amazon Quick Sight dashboards on top of it. The team wants a single data feed with the least ongoing maintenance.
What should the solutions architect recommend?
- AIn the management account, create an AWS Data Exports standard export for CUR 2.0 with hourly granularity and resource IDs, delivered to S3 in Parquet format, and query it with Amazon Athena for the Quick Sight dashboards.A CUR 2.0 export from the management account covers all member accounts with line-item detail, tags and amortized Savings Plans columns. Parquet in S3 is queried directly with Athena, and Quick Sight reads from Athena.
- BUse the Cost Explorer API from a scheduled Lambda function to pull daily costs for each account into Amazon RDS.Cost Explorer is designed for interactive analysis and summaries. Pulling data through the API adds custom code and per-request charges and does not give full hourly line-item detail for all resources.
- CCreate a CUR 2.0 export in each of the 200 member accounts and copy the files to a central bucket.A single export from the management account already includes every member account, so 200 exports and a copy process add needless maintenance.
- DConfigure AWS Budgets reports to email daily CSV summaries to the FinOps team.Budgets reports summarize budget performance. They are not resource-level, hourly data suitable for SQL analysis.
Why: CUR 2.0, delivered through AWS Data Exports, is the most detailed cost and usage dataset AWS provides, with a fixed schema, optional resource IDs, tags and Savings Plans and reservation amortization columns. Created in the management account, it covers the whole organization. Delivering it to S3 in Parquet makes it efficient to query with Athena and to visualize in Quick Sight. Cost Explorer and Budgets are monitoring tools, not raw data feeds.
Determine cost optimization and visibility strategies
Fairhaven Group has four business units sharing 90 accounts. Finance wants monthly costs broken down by a BusinessUnit tag in Cost Explorer, but resources today carry the tag in different spellings such as businessunit, BU and Business-Unit, with values such as retail, Retail and RTL. Finance wants the key and the values standardized to an approved list across all accounts and the tag to appear in billing reports.
Which two actions should the solutions architect take? Each correct answer presents part of the solution.
- ACreate an AWS Organizations tag policy that defines the BusinessUnit key with its capitalization, lists the approved values, enforces compliance for the relevant resource types, and attach it to the organization root.Tag policies standardize tag keys and allowed values across accounts, report noncompliant resources, and can prevent noncompliant tagging operations for supported resource types.
- BActivate BusinessUnit as a user-defined cost allocation tag in the Billing and Cost Management console of the management account.User-defined tags appear in Cost Explorer and cost reports only after they are activated as cost allocation tags, and activation is done in the management (payer) account for the organization.
- CActivate BusinessUnit as a cost allocation tag in each of the 90 member accounts.In an organization, only the management account can activate cost allocation tags, and the activation applies to all member accounts.
- DUse the AWS-generated aws:createdBy tag to identify the business unit for each resource.aws:createdBy records the identity that created a resource, not the business unit that owns it, and it does not standardize any values.
- EUse Resource Groups Tag Editor each month to correct tags by hand before finance runs its reports.Manual monthly correction across 90 accounts is error-prone and does not prevent new noncompliant tags.
Why: A tagging strategy that maps costs to business units needs governance and billing activation. Tag policies in AWS Organizations define the canonical key and allowed values, report noncompliance and can enforce compliance on supported resource types. Cost allocation tags must be activated in the management account before they appear in Cost Explorer and CUR. Cost categories can then group costs from shared or untagged accounts into business units for complete coverage.