Section-Based – Cost Control (SA-Professional)

A company is hosting a multi-tier web application in AWS. It is composed of an Application Load Balancer and EC2 instances across three Availability Zones. During peak load, its stateless web servers operate at 95% utilization. The system is set up to use Reserved Instances to handle the steady-state load and On-Demand Instances to handle the peak load. Your manager instructed you to review the current architecture and do the necessary changes to improve the system.

Which of the following provides the most cost-effective architecture to allow the application to recover quickly in the event that an Availability Zone is unavailable during peak load?

A graphics design startup is using multiple Amazon S3 buckets to store high-resolution media files for their various digital artworks. After securing a partnership deal with a leading media company, the two parties shall be sharing digital resources with one another as part of the contract. The media company frequently performs multiple object retrievals from the S3 buckets every day, which increased the startup’s data transfer costs.

As the Solutions Architect, what should you do to help the startup lower their operational costs?

A car parts manufacturing company installed IP cameras along its assembly line. These cameras are part of the quality inspection process, capturing images of each car part and detecting defects by performing a comparison with a baseline image. To improve the accuracy of detection, the company used Amazon SageMaker AI to train a machine learning (ML) model that contains baseline images and common defects.

Upon detection, the workers should receive feedback from the Linux server in the on-premises data center that hosts an API for the IP cameras. The company wants to make this solution available even when the factory’s internet connectivity is down.

Which of the following options is the recommended solution for deploying the ML model that meets the company’s requirements?

A company has built an application that allows painters to upload photos of original creations. The app allows users from North America and European regions to browse the galleries and order chosen artworks. The application is hosted on a fixed set of Amazon EC2 instances in the us-east-1 region. Using mobile phones, the artists can scan and upload large, high-resolution images, which are stored in a centralized Amazon S3 bucket also in the same region. After the initial week of operation, the European artists are reporting slow performance when uploading images.

Which of the following is the best solution to improve the image upload process?

An analytics company provides big data services to various clients worldwide. For performance-testing activities, a Big Data Analytics application is using an Elastic MapReduce cluster which will only be run once. The cluster is designed to ingest 20 TB of data with a total of 30 EC2 instances and is expected to run for about 48 hours.

Which of the following options is the most cost-effective architecture to implement for this scenario without sacrificing data integrity?

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN, is a research organization that operates the largest particle accelerator in the world and generates terabytes of experimental data every day. A group of data scientists is planning to use an Elastic MapReduce cluster for their data analysis, which will only be run once. The cluster is designed to ingest 300 TB of data with a total of 200 EC2 instances and is expected to run for about 8 hours. The resulting data set must be stored temporarily until it is permanently stored in their AWS Redshift database.

Which of the following options is the best and most cost-effective solution to satisfy the above requirements?

A call center company has recently adopted a hybrid architecture requiring predictable network performance and reduced bandwidth costs to connect its data center and AWS Cloud. Two AWS Direct Connect connections have been implemented between the data center and AWS to ensure stable and highly available network performance. After a recent IT financial audit, it was decided to review the current implementation and replace it with a more cost-effective option.

Which of the following connectivity setups would be recommended for this scenario?

A company has released a new mobile game and its backend servers are hosted on the company’s on-premises data center. The game logic is exposed using REST APIs that have multiple functions depending on the user state. Access to the backend services is controlled with an API key, while any test traffic is distinguished by a different key. A central file server stores player session data. User traffic is variable throughout the day but the on-premises servers cannot handle traffic during peak hours. The game also has latency issues caused by the slow fetching of player session data. The management tasked the solutions architect to migrate this infrastructure to AWS in order to improve scalability and reduce the latency for data access while keeping the backend API model unchanged.

Which of the following is the recommended solution to meet the company requirements?

A software development company based in New Jersey has tasked the solutions architect to design the network architecture for their new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system in AWS. The new system should allow access to business managers and analysts over the Internet, whether they are in their hotel rooms, cafes, or elsewhere. However, the ERP system should not be publicly accessible by anyone over the Internet but only by authorized personnel.

Which of the following network design meets the above requirements while minimizing deployment and operational costs?

A pharmaceutical company has a hybrid cloud architecture in AWS. It has three different accounts for its environments: DEV, UAT, and PROD, which are all part of the consolidated billing account. The PROD account has purchased 10 Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances in the us-west-2a Availability Zone using the ec2:PurchaseReservedInstancesOffering and ec2:ModifyReservedInstances API actions.

Currently, there are no running EC2 instances in the PROD account because the application is not live yet. However, in the DEV account, there are 5 EC2 instances running in the us-west-2a Availability Zone. In the UAT account, there are also 5 EC2 instances running in the us-west-1a Availability Zone. All the EC2 instances in the DEV and UAT accounts match the reserved instance type in the PROD account.

In this scenario, which account benefits the most from the Reserved Instance pricing?

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?

A fintech startup has several resources provisioned on the AWS cloud. The majority of the company’s compute clusters are composed of an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in front of an Auto Scaling group of On-Demand Amazon EC2 instances. To lower down the overall cost, the management wants to have one EC2 instance terminated whenever the overall CPU utilization of the cluster is at 15% or lower.

Which of the following options should the solutions architect implement for a cost-effective and scalable architecture that satisfies the company requirement?

A startup is developing a health-related mobile app for iOS and Android. The co-founder developed a sleep-tracking app that collects the user’s biometric data and stores it in an Amazon DynamoDB table configured with on-demand provisioned throughput. Every day at nine in the morning, a scheduled task scans the DynamoDB table to extract and aggregate last night’s data for each user and stores the results in an Amazon S3 bucket. When the new data is available, the users are then notified via Amazon SNS mobile push notifications. Due to budget constraints, management wants to optimize the backend system’s architecture to reduce costs and increase overall revenue.

Which of the following options can the solutions architect implement to further lower the cost in AWS? (Select TWO.)

A data analytics company has recently adopted a hybrid cloud infrastructure with AWS. They are in the business of collecting and processing vast amounts of data. Each data set generates up to several thousands of files which can range from 10 MB to 1 GB in size. The archived data is rarely restored and in case there is a request to retrieve it, the company has a maximum of 24 hours to send the files. The data sets can be searched using its file ID, set name, authors, tags, and other criteria.

Which of the following options provides the most cost-effective architecture to meet the above requirements?

An Internet-of-Things (IoT) company is building a portal that stores data coming from its 20,000 gas sensors. The gas sensors, which have unique IDs, are used to detect a gas leak or other emissions inside the oil facility. Every 15 minutes, the sensors will send a data point throughout the day containing its ID, current gas level data, as well as the timestamp. Each data point contains critical information coming from the gas sensors. The company would like to query the information coming from a particular gas sensor for the past week and would like to delete all data that are older than eight weeks. The application is using a NoSQL database which is why they are using the Amazon DynamoDB service.   

How would you implement this in the most cost-effective way?