Which AWS service analyzes the configuration and utilization metrics of AWS resources and provides rightsizing recommendations along with identification of idle resources?
Easy · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: C. AWS Compute Optimizer analyzes resource configuration and utilization metrics and returns rightsizing recommendations, along with identification of idle resources. Its coverage extends across Amazon EC2 instances and Auto Scaling groups, Amazon EBS volumes, AWS Lambda functions, Amazon ECS services on AWS Fargate, and several database and other resource types.
A. AWS CloudFormation provisions resources from declarative templates. It creates infrastructure but makes no judgment about whether the sizes chosen are appropriate.
B. AWS Service Catalog publishes approved products for self-service deployment. It governs what can be launched, not how well-sized it is afterwards.
D. AWS Config records resource configurations and evaluates them against compliance rules. It can flag a configuration as non-compliant but does not produce utilization-based sizing recommendations.
22
A company's existing per-core database licenses cannot, under the vendor's terms, be applied to shared-tenancy cloud infrastructure. What is the correct economic conclusion for its migration business case?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: D. Existing entitlements are only worth what their terms allow. If the vendor forbids shared tenancy, the company either deploys on an option that satisfies those terms, which carries its own cost profile, or it pays for license-included capacity and treats the old licences as stranded. Either way the business case has a licensing line that a naive comparison would omit, and getting this wrong is one of the most common ways a migration business case turns out to be optimistic.
A. License mobility is granted by the software vendor, not by AWS. Where the terms do not permit it, the entitlement simply cannot be used on that deployment.
B. AWS does not absolve customers of third-party licensing. It offers license-included options in some services, but that is a charge rather than a waiver.
C. The cost changes precisely because the deployment model changes. Tenancy, core counting, and whether AWS or the customer supplies the licence all move the figure.
23
Which AWS service helps an organization manage software licenses from vendors such as Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and IBM across AWS and on-premises environments, and can enforce licensing rules to reduce the risk of non-compliance?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: D. AWS License Manager centralizes the tracking and enforcement of software license terms across AWS and on-premises environments. Administrators define licensing rules, such as counting sockets, physical cores, or virtual CPUs, and License Manager enforces usage limits, which reduces the risk of over-deployment and the cost exposure of a failed audit.
A. AWS Marketplace is a catalog for finding, buying, and deploying third-party software. It is a purchasing channel rather than a license tracking and enforcement service.
B. AWS Artifact is a self-service portal for downloading AWS compliance reports and agreements. It concerns AWS's own compliance evidence, not customer software licensing.
C. AWS Trusted Advisor provides best-practice recommendations across categories including cost and security. It does not track third-party license entitlements.
24
A company automates the provisioning, patching, and shutdown of its non-production environments. Which TWO economic benefits does this automation deliver? (Choose TWO.)
Intermediate · Select 2 answers
Explanation
Answer: B and C. Automating operations reduces the frequency of manual tasks, which both improves consistency and frees infrastructure and staff time for higher-value work and innovation. Automated shutdown then attacks the largest source of non-production waste directly: environments that sit running outside working hours accrue charges for capacity nobody is using.
A. Monitoring remains essential. Automation increases the rate of change, which makes visibility more important rather than less.
D. There is no automation discount. The savings come from consuming fewer resource-hours, which appears in the normal usage-based bill.
E. Data transfer charges depend on the traffic the architecture generates, not on how the environment is provisioned.
25
Which statement best explains why a workload that is lifted unchanged onto oversized, always-on Amazon EC2 instances may cost more on AWS than it did on premises?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: B. Cost savings are not automatic; they follow from changing how capacity is consumed. Peak-sized instances that never scale in, running 24 hours a day, reproduce the on-premises waste while adding a per-hour charge for it. The levers that produce savings are rightsizing, scaling with demand, turning off idle environments, and moving operational burden to managed services.
A. Owned hardware continues to consume power, cooling, floor space, network, maintenance, and staff attention, and it must eventually be refreshed.
C. No such premium exists. Pricing depends on the resources consumed, not on how the workload arrived.
D. There is no blanket price relationship. The outcome depends on utilization, architecture, and what the on-premises comparison includes.
26
Which statement describes the economic effect of AWS taking on the "undifferentiated heavy lifting" of infrastructure?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: A. AWS describes this as doing the heavy lifting of data center operations such as racking, stacking, and powering servers, and removing the operational burden of managing operating systems and applications through managed services. The economic value is the reallocation of scarce engineering time toward customers and business projects rather than toward infrastructure that no customer ever sees.
B. Application performance remains the customer's responsibility. AWS is responsible for the infrastructure and, for managed services, its operation.
C. Staff are still needed. Their work shifts from hardware and facilities toward architecture, automation, security, and product delivery.
D. No fixed percentage is guaranteed. Outcomes depend on the workloads, the architecture, and how disciplined the organization is about optimization.
27
A company must choose between a license-included Amazon RDS deployment and bringing its own database licenses. Which consideration is most relevant to that decision?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: B. The decision turns on existing entitlements and their terms. If the company already holds licenses whose vendor terms permit deployment on the chosen AWS option, BYOL avoids paying for the same right twice. If it does not, license-included lets AWS hold the license and bundles its cost into the hourly rate, avoiding a separate procurement and true-up.
A. Consolidated billing aggregates charges across accounts in an organization. It does not change licensing entitlements.
C. Storage volume drives storage charges. It is not a factor in whether the customer or AWS supplies the database license.
D. Multi-Availability Zone deployment affects availability and the resources consumed. It may affect how many licenses are required but does not determine which licensing model is appropriate.
28
Which TWO statements about cloud economics are TRUE? (Choose TWO.)
Intermediate · Select 2 answers
Explanation
Answer: D and E. Two ideas define the shift. First, mistakes become cheap and reversible: an oversized environment costs only for the hours it ran, whereas an oversized hardware purchase is sunk for years. Second, massive economies of scale mean pooled demand across hundreds of thousands of customers gives a provider buying power and utilization no single organization can reach, which translates into lower pay-as-you-go prices.
A. Consumption-based spending varies with demand, releases, and architecture, which makes forecasting and cost management a discipline in its own right.
B. Provisioning permanently for peak reproduces the on-premises waste model and is one of the most common causes of unnecessary cloud spending.
C. Architecture is the dominant influence on cost. Instance sizing, storage class, scaling behavior, and choice of managed service change the bill dramatically.
29
A finance director argues that because the company already owns its servers, keeping the workload on premises is free. Which response most accurately corrects this?
Hard · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: A. The purchase price is sunk, but the ongoing operating model is not. Facilities costs such as space, power, cooling, racks, uninterruptible power supplies, and physical security continue, as do network services, maintenance contracts, and the staff time spent operating the estate. At end of life the hardware must be replaced, which restarts the capital cycle.
B. Age affects how soon a refresh is due, but a new server also consumes power, cooling, space, and support from the day it is installed.
C. Depreciation reflects the consumption of an asset's value over its life and is a genuine cost in any honest comparison.
D. Licensing is one ongoing cost among several, and citing it alone still leaves the facilities, network, maintenance, and refresh costs unaccounted for.
30
Two proposals are compared. Proposal A reduces the monthly AWS bill by 12 percent. Proposal B shortens the time to release a new feature from six weeks to four days. Which statement best reflects how cloud economics evaluates these?
Hard · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: C. Cloud value is not only the invoice. Cost optimization is defined as delivering business value at the lowest price point, and the pillar's "measure overall efficiency" principle asks for the business output of a workload to be compared against the cost of delivering it. Faster release cycles can bring revenue forward and reduce the cost of a wrong bet, and those effects can be estimated and weighed against a 12 percent saving.
A. Agility is routinely quantified through revenue brought forward, reduced cost of failed experiments, and staff time recovered. The estimate is imprecise, not impossible.
B. Judging only the bill would favor never shipping anything, since the cheapest workload is one that does nothing. Value must appear on the other side of the ratio.
D. Agility is valuable but not unconditionally dominant. For a stable, low-change workload a durable cost reduction may well be worth more.