Question

Difficulty: MediumAWS Pricing Calculator

A municipal government is planning to implement an IoT-based smart parking system. The proposed architecture includes thousands of IoT sensors publishing data to AWS IoT Core, which will trigger AWS Lambda functions to write records to an Amazon DynamoDB table. Before starting the procurement process, the project manager needs to estimate the potential monthly costs of these hypothetical services. Which of the following tools should the project manager use to model this configuration and estimate the future costs?

  1. AWS Pricing CalculatorAnswer
  2. B
    AWS Cost Explorer
  3. C
    AWS Cost and Usage Report
  4. D
    AWS Budgets

Answer

AWS Pricing Calculator
The correct answer is the AWS Pricing Calculator. It allows users to input expected resource parameters (such as the number of IoT messages, Lambda request counts, and DynamoDB read/write capacities) to estimate monthly costs before any infrastructure is actually created in AWS.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify that the requirement is for a pre-deployment cost estimate of a hypothetical AWS architecture before any resources are provisioned.
The target goal is upfront, pre-deployment estimation.
This determines that post-deployment tracking and monitoring tools are incorrect.
2
Evaluate the available AWS tools to find one that allows inputting custom configurations (such as IoT Core messages, Lambda executions, and DynamoDB storage) to calculate estimated pricing.
The AWS Pricing Calculator is selected as it supports creating a custom estimate for these services based on hypothetical usage inputs.
It matches the capability to estimate future costs based on user-defined configurations.

Key Concept

Estimating future AWS costs for hypothetical configurations prior to deployment
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