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Hello PeterMescher,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on these items.
“A company is modernizing its on-premises system by migrating it to AWS. The system will be hosted on EC2 instances managed by Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and use Amazon RDS for MySQL as the database. The system has predictable schedules of high usage, especially during sales events and holiday seasons.
What pricing options should the company consider when selecting the MOST cost-optimized solution?”
In this question, the scenario explicitly mentioned that the system has predictable schedules of high usage. This predictability allows the company to plan ahead:
- Baseline traffic is covered by Compute Savings Plans (stable, guaranteed compute).
- Peak traffic is handled by Spot Instances, which provide elasticity at a fraction of the cost.
- EKS can reschedule pods if Spot nodes are interrupted, ensuring the workload continues on baseline capacity. – https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/run-your-kubernetes-workloads-on-amazon-ec2-spot-instances-with-amazon-eks/
Baseline traffic is guaranteed by Savings Plans, and Spot is used only for burst scaling during scheduled peaks.
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“EDIT: There’s another question that makes the exact same mistake: “A digital media publishing company hired a solutions architect to manage its online portal, which is deployed on a single Amazon EC2 instance. The architecture uses a combination of Reserved EC2 Instances to handle the steady-state load and On-Demand EC2 Instances to handle the peak load. Currently, the web servers operate at 90% utilization during peak load.
Which of the following is the most cost-effective option to enable the online portal to quickly recover in the event of a zone outage?” Again, the “correct” answer suggests using spot instances.”
The correct answer here is: Launch a Spot Fleet of On-demand and Spot instances across multiple Availability Zones. Attach an Application Load Balancer to the fleet.
- The On‑Demand instances provide guaranteed baseline capacity, ensuring the portal remains available even if Spot capacity is constrained.
- The Spot instances add cost‑effective elasticity during peak load, and diversification strategies (capacity‑optimized or diversified allocation) reduce the risk of interruption.
- The multi‑AZ + ALB setup ensures resilience and quick recovery in case of a zone outage.
This hybrid approach balances availability, recovery, and cost‑effectiveness better than pure Spot or pure On‑Demand solutions.
I hope this helps. Let us know if you need further assistance.
Regards,
JR @ Tutorials Dojo
