Question

Difficulty: EasyAWS Pricing Models

An education technology startup is setting up its AWS environment for the upcoming school year. They have two specific requirements for their Amazon EC2 instances:

1. Running experimental, short-lived development sandboxes for a few hours at a time, where they want to pay only for what they use with no upfront commitment.
2. Running a daily data analysis job that processes non-critical student feedback logs. This job can be paused and restarted at any time without data loss if capacity is reclaimed.

Which of the following Amazon EC2 pricing models are the most cost-effective options for these workloads? (Select TWO.)

  1. On-Demand InstancesAnswer
  2. Spot InstancesAnswer
  3. C
    Reserved Instances
  4. D
    Savings Plans
  5. E
    Dedicated Hosts

Answer

On-Demand Instances and Spot Instances
The correct options are On-Demand Instances and Spot Instances. On-Demand Instances allow paying for compute capacity by the hour or second with no long-term commitment, making them ideal for short-lived development sandboxes. Spot Instances allow using spare EC2 capacity at steep discounts, which is highly cost-effective for non-critical, fault-tolerant batch analysis that can tolerate interruptions.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the first requirement regarding experimental, short-lived development sandboxes running for a few hours with no upfront commitment.
Identify On-Demand Instances as the best match, as they offer pay-as-you-go pricing with no long-term contracts.
Development environments are typically irregular, and paying only when the instances are running saves money without locking the startup into a contract.
2
Analyze the second requirement for a daily data analysis job processing non-critical feedback logs that can be interrupted and resumed.
Identify Spot Instances as the best match because they offer the lowest price for workloads that are fault-tolerant.
Since the feedback log processing is non-critical and can be paused, using Spot Instances takes advantage of spare capacity at up to a 90% discount.

Key Concept

Selecting cost-effective EC2 pricing models based on workload stability, duration, and fault tolerance.
Estimated Time:1m 0s
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