Which TWO practices represent appropriate ways to optimize AWS costs? (Choose TWO.)
Choosing two appropriate cost optimization practices.
Apply Savings Plans or Reserved Instances to steady-state workloads.
Correct. Applying long-term commitment Savings Plans or Reserved Instances to workloads that run continuously provides significantly larger discounts than on-demand pricing, enabling cost optimization.
Provision larger-than-needed instances at all times to anticipate future growth.
Provisioning resources ahead of time in anticipation of future growth is an on-premises mindset. In the cloud, resources can be scaled up when needed, so always maintaining oversized instances results in unnecessary expenditure.
Right-sizing — selecting instances that match actual load — is the cost optimization practice; always maintaining oversized instances is the opposite, so this option is incorrect.
Identify unused resources and stop or delete those that are no longer needed.
Correct. Inventorying unused resources and stopping or deleting them eliminates unnecessary charges and optimizes costs.
Apply a 3-year Reserved Instance with a high discount rate even to short-term test environments.
Reserved Instances and Savings Plans discounts are only advantageous when the resource is used continuously throughout the entire commitment period.
Applying a 3-year commitment to a short-lived test environment means payments continue for the unused period, ultimately costing more, so this option is incorrect. Short-term or intermittent usage should use on-demand or Spot Instances.
Keep all infrequently accessed data in Amazon S3 Standard to prioritize retrieval speed.
Infrequently accessed data can have its storage costs reduced by moving it to lower-cost storage classes such as Amazon S3 Standard-IA or Amazon S3 Glacier.
Continuing to use S3 Standard regardless of access frequency abandons storage class optimization and is the opposite of cost optimization practice, so this option is incorrect.
Standard cost optimization practices: Apply Savings Plans/RI to steady-state workloads / Stop and delete unused resources / Right-sizing / Use appropriate storage classes. Over-provisioning and long-term commitments on short-term workloads are anti-patterns.