Category: CSAP – Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions

[vlada]

Question:

A company wants to host its internal web application in AWS. The front-end uses Docker containers and it connects to a MySQL instance as the backend database. The company plans to use AWS-managed container services to reduce the overhead in managing the servers. The application should allow employees to access company documents, which are accessed frequently for the first 3 months and then rarely after that. As part of the company policy, these documents must be retained for at least five years. Because this is an internal web application, the company wants to have the lowest possible cost.

Which of the following implementations is the most cost-effective solution?

One of the offered answer is:

Deploy the Docker containers using Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) with Amazon EC2 Spot Instances. Use Spot instances for the Amazon RDS database and its read replicas. Create an encrypted EBS volume on the EC2 hosts that is shared with the containers to store the company documents. Set up a cron job that will delete the files after five years.

And the explanation says:

Deploy the Docker containers using Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) with Amazon EC2 Spot Instances. Use Spot instances for the Amazon RDS database and its read replicas. Create an encrypted EBS volume on the EC2 hosts that is shared with the containers to store the company documents. Set up a cron job that will delete the files after five years is incorrect. Storing company documents on the EC2 instances will require more disk space on instances, which is unnecessary and expensive. Using Spot instances for RDS instances is not recommended as this will cause major downtime or data loss in case AWS terminates your spot instance.

Last sentence implies that it is possible to have RDS Spot instance.

IMHO it should be saying:

Amazon RDS does not support Spot Instances. All RDS database instances use On-Demand, Reserved or Savings Plan pricing only. Spot pricing is not available for RDS.

[JR-TutorialsDojo]

Hello vlada,

Thank you for bringing this to our attention.

We apologize for any confusion this may have caused. We will make the necessary updates, which should be reflected on the portal soon.

Let us know if you need further assistance.

Best regards,
JR @ Tutorials Dojo