Question

Difficulty: HardAWS Compute Services

A financial services company needs to process daily transaction log files uploaded sporadically to Amazon S3. Each file requires intensive computational analysis that takes approximately 18 minutes to complete. To optimize costs and operations, the company wants a serverless compute option that charges them only for the exact resource duration consumed during processing and eliminates the overhead of managing operating systems or scaling virtual servers. Which AWS compute service is the most appropriate for this workload?

  1. AWS FargateAnswer
  2. B
    AWS Lambda
  3. C
    Amazon EC2
  4. D
    Amazon Lightsail

Answer

AWS Fargate is the most appropriate compute service for this workload because it provides serverless container execution with no 15-minute limit, removing the operational overhead of managing servers while charging only for the resources consumed during the 18-minute run.
AWS Fargate is the correct choice because it is a serverless compute engine that allows containerized applications to run without provisioning or managing virtual machines. It has no 15-minute execution limit, which allows it to easily accommodate the 18-minute log processing task while maintaining a serverless, pay-per-use consumption model.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the workload characteristics and constraints.
The workload is triggered sporadically, runs for 18 minutes, and requires a serverless model (no management of virtual machines) with pay-per-use pricing.
This helps narrow down the compute options by ruling out non-serverless services and services with strict runtime limitations.
2
Evaluate AWS Lambda against the 18-minute runtime requirement.
AWS Lambda is ruled out because it has a maximum execution time limit of 15 minutes, meaning the 18-minute processing job would time out.
Understanding the limits of serverless services is essential for proper compute selection.
3
Evaluate Amazon EC2 and Amazon Lightsail against the operational overhead and pricing requirements.
Both EC2 and Lightsail are ruled out because they require managing virtual machine configurations, operating systems, and do not natively offer a pay-per-execution serverless model.
This eliminates options that introduce unnecessary operational management overhead.
4
Verify AWS Fargate capabilities.
AWS Fargate runs containers serverlessly, does not have a 15-minute runtime timeout, manages the underlying infrastructure automatically, and charges only for the resources used during the active task duration.
This confirms AWS Fargate meets all the requirements of the scenario.

Key Concept

Selecting the appropriate AWS compute service based on workload duration, management overhead, and serverless requirements.
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