Question

Difficulty: EasyIdentifying and Cleaning Up Underutilized Resources

A SysOps administrator is reviewing AWS Trusted Advisor cost optimization reports and identifies several underutilized resources, including stopped Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes and unassociated Elastic IP addresses. The administrator wants to reduce account costs by cleaning up these resources without impacting active workloads.

Which of the following actions should the administrator take? (Select TWO.)

  1. Delete the unassociated Elastic IP addresses to stop incurring hourly charges for unused public IPv4 addresses.Answer
  2. Create Amazon EBS snapshots of the stopped EBS volumes for backup, and then delete the idle volumes to stop paying for volume storage.Answer
  3. C
    Enable detailed monitoring on all running EC2 instances to automatically terminate any instance whose CPU utilization falls below 5%5\%.
  4. D
    Set the retention period of all CloudWatch log groups to Never Expire to ensure metric logs for underutilized resources are retained indefinitely.
  5. E
    Apply tags to the underutilized resources, as tags will automatically delete the resources once they reach a configured age.

Answer

The correct actions are to delete the unassociated Elastic IP addresses and to create Amazon EBS snapshots of the stopped EBS volumes before deleting the volumes.
Deleting unassociated Elastic IP addresses stops the hourly charges AWS applies to unused public IPv4 allocations. Creating EBS snapshots of stopped EBS volumes preserves their data cost-effectively in Amazon S3 before the active volumes are deleted, which eliminates active EBS storage charges.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify underutilized and idle resources using AWS Trusted Advisor cost optimization checks, which flag unassociated Elastic IPs and stopped EBS volumes.
A list of unused public IPs and stopped volumes that are incurring charges.
Trusted Advisor provides a centralized view of cost-saving opportunities.
2
Release or delete the unassociated Elastic IP addresses.
The unused public IPv4 addresses are returned to the AWS pool, stopping the hourly allocation charges.
AWS charges for unassociated Elastic IP addresses to encourage efficient usage of IPv4 addresses.
3
Create snapshots of the stopped EBS volumes and then delete the volumes.
The data is backed up to Amazon S3 as snapshots, and the active EBS volumes are removed, stopping active volume storage charges.
Stopped EBS volumes still incur standard storage charges until they are deleted. Snapshots store data more cost-effectively.

Key Concept

Cleaning up idle and underutilized resources, specifically unassociated Elastic IPs and stopped EBS volumes, is a primary AWS cost optimization practice.
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