Question

Difficulty: HardAWS Pricing Calculator

An enterprise retail organization is preparing to deploy an e-commerce platform on AWS. The design includes running application containers on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) with AWS Fargate launch type across two AWS Regions, storing structured product catalogs in Amazon Aurora, and storing media assets in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Before deploying any services or writing code, the cloud financial operations team must estimate the monthly costs for this hypothetical infrastructure.

Which of the following actions should the team perform to model and estimate these projected costs? (Select TWO.)

  1. Use the AWS Pricing Calculator to input the estimated container count, vCPU/memory requirements, database storage size, and data transfer volumes between regions to generate a monthly cost estimate.Answer
  2. Configure different groups of services and resource estimates in the AWS Pricing Calculator to compare the cost differences of deploying the architecture across multiple AWS Regions.Answer
  3. C
    Analyze past resource usage patterns using AWS Cost Explorer to forecast the future monthly costs of the new multi-region ECS and Aurora architecture.
  4. D
    Allocate upfront capital expenses (CapEx) for physical host hardware using the AWS Pricing Calculator to model the purchasing of dedicated physical servers for the ECS clusters.
  5. E
    Download the AWS Cost & Usage Report to extract detailed, granular billing metadata for the planned multi-region S3 and ECS resources.

Answer

To estimate these projected costs, the team should use the AWS Pricing Calculator to input the estimated resource specifications (such as container count, vCPU/memory, database size, and data transfer volumes) and configure service groups to compare costs across different AWS Regions.
The AWS Pricing Calculator is the primary tool for estimating the cost of AWS services before they are deployed. It allows users to create cost estimates for hypothetical architectures by specifying configurations such as the number of ECS containers, Fargate vCPU/memory requirements, database storage size, and S3 storage classes. It also supports grouping resources to compare costs across different AWS Regions or deployment configurations, helping teams make informed architectural decisions based on projected expenses.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the requirements of the scenario, which is estimating the monthly costs of a hypothetical, pre-deployment multi-region application architecture.
The scenario requires a planning and cost estimation tool for future configurations rather than tracking actual historical spending.
Since no resources have been deployed yet, tools that track existing resources cannot be used.
2
Evaluate the capabilities of the AWS Pricing Calculator for the scenario.
The AWS Pricing Calculator can model hypothetical workloads, including Amazon ECS, AWS Fargate, Amazon Aurora, and Amazon S3 across multiple regions, allowing the team to estimate monthly costs and compare different region configurations.
This directly aligns with the need to generate pre-deployment cost projections based on custom resource settings.
3
Differentiate the AWS Pricing Calculator from post-deployment billing and monitoring tools like AWS Cost Explorer and the AWS Cost & Usage Report, and verify economic principles.
Eliminate options suggesting the use of historical monitoring or reporting tools, as well as capital expense planning for physical hardware.
Post-deployment tools require active resources to generate data, and AWS operates on an operating expense (OpEx) model rather than a capital expense (CapEx) hardware purchasing model.

Key Concept

Estimating pre-deployment costs of hypothetical workloads using the AWS Pricing Calculator.
Estimated Time:2m 30s
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