Mixed practice exam 6

Explanation

Answer: D and E. Amazon S3 bills across several independent dimensions, and a candidate who thinks only about per-GB storage will misestimate badly. Requests are a genuine line item, which is why workloads with very large numbers of small objects can be request-dominated. S3 Intelligent-Tiering adds a per-object monitoring and automation charge in exchange for automatic tiering, and it deliberately charges no retrieval fees, which is what makes it safe for unpredictable access patterns.

• A. Storage is only one dimension. Requests and retrievals, data transfer, management features such as S3 Storage Lens and inventory, and replication are all billed separately.
• B. Data transfer into Amazon S3 from the internet is free. Only outbound transfer is charged, and it is tiered.
• C. S3 Standard has no minimum storage duration charge. Minimum durations apply to S3 Standard-IA and One Zone-IA at 30 days, the Glacier Instant Retrieval and Glacier Flexible Retrieval classes at 90 days, and Deep Archive at 180 days.

Explanation

Answer: C. A Multi-AZ deployment provisions a standby DB instance in a second Availability Zone, so the hourly instance charge reflects two instances rather than one. Because RDS replicates writes synchronously to the standby, write I/O roughly doubles while read I/O is unchanged. AWS does not charge for the replication traffic between the primary and the standby. Multi-AZ is bought for availability and durability, not for performance, and the pricing reflects that.

• A. There is no small failover fee. The cost of Multi-AZ is the standby instance itself plus the additional write I/O.
• B. In a Multi-AZ DB instance deployment the standby does not serve read traffic; it exists to take over on failover. Read scaling comes from read replicas, or from a Multi-AZ DB cluster deployment, which does have readable standbys.
• D. AWS explicitly exempts Multi-AZ replication traffic between the primary and the standby from data transfer charges.

Explanation

Answer: B and D. Minimum storage duration charges are a defining cost characteristic of the infrequent-access and archive classes, and they exist to stop short-lived data from being parked in classes priced for long retention. S3 Standard-IA and S3 One Zone-IA both apply 30 days, S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval and S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval both apply 90 days, and S3 Glacier Deep Archive applies 180 days. An object removed before the minimum is still billed for the full period, which is why lifecycle policies that transition data too aggressively often raise the bill.

• A. S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval applies a 90-day minimum storage duration charge, not 30 days. The 30-day minimum belongs to the two infrequent-access classes.
• C. S3 Intelligent-Tiering has no minimum storage duration charge. Its distinguishing charge is a per-object monthly monitoring and automation fee, and it levies no retrieval fees.
• E. S3 One Zone-IA does apply a 30-day minimum storage duration charge. Its single-Availability-Zone design lowers the per-GB rate but does not remove the minimum duration.

Explanation

Answer: D. AWS Cost Explorer is the visualization and analysis tool for costs and usage that have already been incurred. It presents spend as graphs and tabular reports that can be filtered and grouped by dimensions such as service, linked account, Region, and tag, and it also surfaces Reserved Instance and rightsizing recommendations. The console experience is available at no charge.

• A. AWS Trusted Advisor inspects an environment against best practices and produces recommendations, including cost optimization findings, but it is not a tool for visualizing spend over time.
• B. AWS Pricing Calculator estimates the cost of workloads a customer has not yet deployed. It works from configuration parameters the customer enters, not from actual usage.
• C. AWS Config records and evaluates resource configuration changes for compliance and auditing. It does not report on cost or usage.

Explanation

Answer: A. AWS Budgets is the service for setting cost and usage thresholds and being alerted when actual or forecast spend crosses them. Notifications can be delivered by email, through an Amazon SNS topic, or into a chat application. Budgets can also trigger Budget Actions, which apply a control such as a restrictive IAM policy automatically when a threshold is breached, so the response can go beyond notification.

• B. AWS CloudTrail records API activity for governance and auditing. It captures who did what, not how much it cost.
• C. AWS Cost and Usage Reports deliver highly detailed billing data to an Amazon S3 bucket for analysis. They are a data source, not an alerting mechanism.
• D. AWS Pricing Calculator produces estimates for planned workloads before deployment and has no visibility into actual account spending.

Explanation

Answer: C. AWS Pricing Calculator is a free web-based planning tool for modeling the cost of a solution before it exists. The customer enters configuration parameters such as instance type, Region, storage size, and payment option, and the calculator produces upfront, monthly, and annual estimates with the calculation shown. Estimates can be saved, shared by link, and exported to CSV or PDF. The public calculator at calculator.aws requires no AWS account at all, while a separate in-console AWS Pricing Calculator inside AWS Billing and Cost Management can additionally model an existing account's discounts and purchase commitments.

• A. Cost and Usage Reports are generated from actual metered usage and therefore cannot describe a workload that has not run.
• B. AWS Budgets tracks actual and forecast spend against thresholds on a live account, so it presumes usage already exists.
• D. Cost Explorer analyzes costs that have already been incurred. It cannot price an architecture that has never been deployed.

Explanation

Answer: A. AWS Cost and Usage Reports contain the most comprehensive cost and usage data AWS publishes. Each report holds line items for every unique combination of AWS product, usage type, and operation in the account, can be aggregated hourly, daily, or monthly, and is delivered to an Amazon S3 bucket the customer owns. That level of detail is what makes the report the right input for chargeback, showback, and analysis in a data warehouse or query engine. AWS now also offers Data Exports as the recommended way to receive this data, delivering the same underlying dataset in a customizable schema to an Amazon S3 bucket you own.

• B. Cost Explorer is an interactive analysis and visualization layer. It is quicker to use but presents aggregated views rather than the full line-item detail of the report.
• C. The Bills page summarizes charges for a billing period by service and account. It is a summary view, not a granular dataset.
• D. AWS Budgets tracks spend against thresholds and issues alerts. It is not a source of detailed usage records.

Explanation

Answer: B. AWS publishes Cost and Usage Reports to an Amazon S3 bucket that the customer owns and specifies. Delivering to customer-owned storage is what allows the data to be queried directly with services such as Amazon Athena or loaded into Amazon Redshift, and it means the customer controls retention and access to their own billing detail. AWS updates the report in the bucket at least once a day, and the first delivery can take up to 24 hours.

• A. There is no delivery mechanism to an EBS volume. The report is written to object storage.
• C. Email delivery is used for AWS Budgets notifications, not for the report itself, which is far too large and detailed for email.
• D. The AWS Support Center is for creating and managing support cases. Billing reports are not distributed through it.

Explanation

Answer: A. Cost Explorer displays up to 13 months of historical cost and usage data alongside a forecast of future spend, and it can group and filter by dimensions including service, linked account, Region, usage type, and cost allocation tag. Using the Cost Explorer user interface is free of charge; only programmatic access through the Cost Explorer API is billed, at a small per-request rate. Data for the current month becomes available in about 24 hours and refreshes at least daily.

• B. AWS Service Catalog lets organizations curate and govern approved products for deployment. It has no cost reporting function.
• C. AWS Compute Optimizer analyzes Amazon CloudWatch utilization metrics to recommend rightsizing. It reports on resource efficiency rather than on spend by service and account.
• D. AWS Pricing Calculator models the cost of hypothetical configurations. It holds no historical data about the account.

Explanation

Answer: C. Coverage and utilization answer opposite questions, and AWS Budgets provides a budget type for each. A coverage budget tracks what proportion of eligible usage is being covered by the commitment, so it alerts when the company is running more On-Demand usage than it intended and should consider buying more commitment. That is exactly the question asked here.

• A. A utilization budget tracks how much of the commitment the company has purchased is actually being used. It alerts on wasted commitment, which is the opposite concern.
• B. A usage budget tracks the quantity of a service consumed, such as instance hours or GB stored, not commitment coverage.
• D. A cost budget tracks dollars spent against a threshold. It cannot express a coverage percentage for a commitment.