Question

Difficulty: MediumCost-Optimized Compute Selection and Purchasing Strategies

A gaming company hosts its dedicated multiplayer session servers on Amazon EC2. While player traffic fluctuates, the company requires a constant baseline of 50 EC2 instances 24/7 to maintain minimum coverage. Additionally, the company runs a continuous background analytics pipeline on Amazon ECS using AWS Fargate that requires a stable allocation of 20 vCPUs and 80 GB of RAM. The backend database runs on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 24/7. Which combination of purchasing options will provide the most cost-effective solution for this architecture?

  1. Purchase a Compute Savings Plan to cover the baseline EC2 instances and AWS Fargate tasks, and purchase Amazon RDS Reserved Instances for the PostgreSQL database.Answer
  2. B
    Purchase a Compute Savings Plan to cover the baseline EC2 instances, AWS Fargate tasks, and the Amazon RDS PostgreSQL database.
  3. C
    Migrate the continuous background analytics pipeline to AWS Lambda to run continuously, and purchase a Compute Savings Plan to cover the baseline EC2 instances, the Lambda execution, and the database.
  4. D
    Purchase EC2 Instance Savings Plans to cover both the baseline EC2 instances and AWS Fargate tasks, and purchase Amazon RDS Reserved Instances for the database.

Answer

Purchase a Compute Savings Plan to cover the baseline EC2 instances and AWS Fargate tasks, and purchase Amazon RDS Reserved Instances for the PostgreSQL database.
The correct option is the strategy of purchasing a Compute Savings Plan to cover both the baseline EC2 instances and AWS Fargate tasks, combined with Amazon RDS Reserved Instances for the PostgreSQL database. Compute Savings Plans provide the flexibility to apply discounts across both EC2 and AWS Fargate compute types under a single commitment, while RDS Reserved Instances are the correct vehicle to discount the continuous database compute usage.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the compute components of the architecture.
The architecture contains three main compute components: Amazon EC2 instances for gaming sessions, AWS Fargate tasks for analytics, and Amazon RDS for the PostgreSQL database.
Understanding each component's hosting model is required to choose the correct purchasing strategy.
2
Evaluate the coverage of AWS Savings Plans.
Compute Savings Plans apply to EC2 instance usage, AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda. EC2 Instance Savings Plans apply only to EC2 instances. Neither plan covers Amazon RDS.
This determines which savings plan type is appropriate for the EC2 and Fargate workloads.
3
Evaluate the purchasing options for the Amazon RDS database.
Amazon RDS cost optimization requires purchasing RDS Reserved Instances, as Savings Plans do not apply to RDS.
RDS has its own separate reservation model for 1-year or 3-year commitments.
4
Combine the findings into a single cost-optimized strategy.
A Compute Savings Plan covers the EC2 and Fargate baseline, and RDS Reserved Instances cover the RDS database baseline.
This matches the services to their respective discount mechanisms to achieve maximum cost savings.

Key Concept

Compute Savings Plans cover EC2, Fargate, and Lambda usage, whereas Amazon RDS requires RDS Reserved Instances for reservation discounts.
Estimated Time:2m 0s
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