Question

Difficulty: MediumAWS Pricing Calculator

A financial technology startup is planning to build a new transactional ledger system on AWS. The proposed architecture will utilize Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, and Amazon API Gateway. Before deploying any resources, the startup needs to model and estimate their expected monthly operational costs. Which of the following actions can the startup perform using the AWS Pricing Calculator to achieve this? (Select TWO.)

  1. Estimate the monthly costs of the DynamoDB tables by specifying expected read/write throughput and storage requirements.Answer
  2. Compare the estimated operational costs of the serverless architecture across different AWS Regions.Answer
  3. C
    Define custom budget thresholds and configure email alerts when actual monthly spend exceeds those thresholds.
  4. D
    Generate a detailed report analyzing the actual historical billing data and usage trends of resources over the past three months.
  5. E
    Determine the precise reduction in capital expenditure (CapEx) compared to physical data center hardware based on actual CPU utilization logs.

Answer

The startup can use the AWS Pricing Calculator to estimate the monthly costs of the DynamoDB tables by defining parameters like storage and throughput, and to compare the estimated operational costs across different AWS Regions.
The AWS Pricing Calculator is designed to estimate the costs of AWS services prior to deployment. It allows users to input hypothetical parameters, such as DynamoDB read/write capacity and storage, to model monthly costs. Additionally, because AWS prices vary by location, it allows users to compare estimates across different AWS Regions to optimize where to deploy their workload.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the primary purpose of the tool mentioned in the scenario, which is to estimate costs before any resources are actually deployed.
The AWS Pricing Calculator is the correct tool for generating pre-deployment cost estimates based on hypothetical inputs.
This helps rule out post-deployment tracking and monitoring tools.
2
Determine which features of the AWS Pricing Calculator match the requirements for modeling the proposed architecture.
The calculator allows configuring specific service parameters (like DynamoDB storage and throughput) and selecting different AWS Regions to compare costs.
This directly maps to the two correct options.
3
Evaluate the remaining options to ensure they represent post-deployment or budgeting tools rather than pre-deployment estimation tools.
Setting budgets (AWS Budgets), reviewing past spending (AWS Cost Explorer), and analyzing actual resource utilization logs are post-deployment tasks.
This confirms that the other choices are incorrect distractors.

Key Concept

The AWS Pricing Calculator is a web-based planning tool used to estimate the cost of AWS services for hypothetical use cases and architectures before deployment.
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