Examkin

Question

Difficulty: HardAWS Billing and Cost Management Tools

A software development firm wants to prevent cost overruns in its testing environment. The company needs to configure a mechanism that will automatically apply a restrictive IAM policy to a developer group if the actual monthly spend in the environment exceeds 3,0003,000. Which AWS billing and cost management tool should the company use to configure this automated threshold-based action?

  1. A
    AWS Cost Explorer
  2. B
    AWS Billing Conductor
  3. AWS BudgetsAnswer
  4. D
    AWS Pricing Calculator

Answer

AWS Budgets is the correct tool because it supports budget actions that can automate responses, such as applying restrictive IAM policies, when cost thresholds are crossed.
AWS Budgets allows users to set custom cost and usage budgets. It also supports budget actions, which can be configured to automatically execute specific mitigation steps—such as applying a restrictive IAM policy, applying Service Control Policies (SCPs), or stopping targeted EC2/RDS instances—when actual or forecasted costs exceed a defined threshold.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the requirement for threshold-based cost alerting combined with automated administrative action (attaching an IAM policy).
The solution must support both monitoring spending thresholds and executing automated programmatic responses.
This rules out purely analytical or planning tools.
2
Evaluate the capabilities of the available AWS cost management tools.
AWS Budgets is the only tool in the cost management suite that supports 'Budget Actions' to automatically run tasks like applying IAM policies or stopping resources when thresholds are breached.
Other tools like AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Pricing Calculator are limited to analysis and estimation, respectively.

Key Concept

AWS Budgets allows you to set custom budgets that track your AWS costs and usage, and configure automated budget actions (such as applying restrictive IAM policies or stopping resources) to control costs programmatically when limits are exceeded.
Rate this question

Topics

AWS Billing and Cost Management Tools

More questions from this topic