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Difficulty: HardAWS Cost Monitoring, Budgeting, and Optimization Tool Analysis

A financial technology organization operates its production workloads across multiple AWS accounts within an organization in AWS Organizations. The cloud operations team wants to implement a cost-governance strategy to address two specific requirements:

First, they need to identify unusual spending patterns in raw data transfer costs as soon as they occur and receive notifications.

Second, they must ensure that a sandbox environment (tagged `Environment: Sandbox`) does not exceed its monthly budget, and automatically apply a restrictive Service Control Policy (SCP) to prevent further resource provisioning if the sandbox spending exceeds 120% of the budgeted amount.

Which combination of actions should the solutions architect recommend to meet these requirements? (Select TWO.)

  1. Configure AWS Cost Anomaly Detection with a Service monitor to identify anomalies in AWS service charges, and connect it to an Amazon SNS topic for immediate alert delivery.Answer
  2. Establish a tag-filtered cost budget in AWS Budgets targeting the `Environment: Sandbox` tag. Define a budget action that attaches a restrictive Service Control Policy (SCP) to the Sandbox Organizational Unit (OU) if actual costs reach 120% of the threshold.Answer
  3. C
    Schedule a daily report delivery in AWS Cost Explorer to inspect data transfer costs, sending email notifications to the cloud operations team when costs exceed the previous day's baseline.
  4. D
    Purchase a Compute Savings Plan matching the sandbox's historical compute usage to automatically cap sandbox expenditures at 120% of the budgeted monthly limit.
  5. E
    Implement AWS Budgets for the sandbox environment, and configure an automated action utilizing the AWS account root user credentials to shut down all active EC2 instances when the cost threshold is breached.

Answer

The correct configuration consists of setting up AWS Cost Anomaly Detection with a Service monitor integrated with an Amazon SNS topic, and establishing a tag-filtered budget in AWS Budgets that triggers a Service Control Policy action at 120% of the budget threshold.
AWS Cost Anomaly Detection uses machine learning to identify unusual spending patterns in AWS services (such as data transfer) and can alert teams in near-real-time using Amazon SNS subscriptions. For strict budget enforcement, AWS Budgets allows you to monitor tag-filtered resource costs and configure automated budget actions. One supported budget action is applying a Service Control Policy (SCP) at the Organizational Unit (OU) level, which programmatically halts new resource provisioning when the actual spend threshold (120%) is crossed.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Address the anomaly detection requirement by configuring AWS Cost Anomaly Detection with a Service monitor.
This monitors AWS services specifically (such as data transfer) and uses machine learning to identify unusual spending patterns.
Machine learning anomaly detection is proactive and runs automatically, satisfying the near-real-time warning requirement.
2
Configure an AWS Cost Anomaly Detection subscription targeting an Amazon SNS topic.
This sends alerts to the cloud operations team immediately upon detection of anomalous spend.
Integrating with SNS ensures automated and immediate alerting.
3
Address the monthly budget control requirement by creating a tag-filtered budget in AWS Budgets targeting the `Environment: Sandbox` tag.
This tracks expenditures specific to the sandbox environment.
AWS Budgets can monitor costs matching specific tags and supports automated administrative actions.
4
Define an AWS Budgets action configured to apply a restrictive Service Control Policy (SCP) to the Sandbox OU at 120% actual spend.
If actual costs reach 120% of the budget, the SCP is automatically applied, denying further resource creation.
AWS Budgets action can directly apply SCPs via AWS Organizations integration, meeting the control requirement.

Key Concept

Combining AWS Cost Anomaly Detection for proactive, machine-learning-based alerting with AWS Budgets Actions (SCPs) for tag-based budget enforcement.
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Topics

AWS Cost Monitoring, Budgeting, and Optimization Tool Analysis