What other cost-optimization methods should the company implement to further reduce costs without impacting the reliability of the application?
Double the instance count in the Auto Scaling groups and reduce the instance size to m5.large.
Reserve capacity for the RDS database and the minimum number of EC2 instances that are constantly running.
Reduce the RDS instance size to db.r4.xlarge and add five equivalently sized read replicas to provide reliability.
Reserve capacity for all EC2 instances and leverage Spot Instance pricing for the RDS database.
Explanations:
Doubling the instance count while reducing the instance size to m5.large would not optimize costs effectively, as m5.large may not handle the workload efficiently. This could lead to performance degradation, impacting application reliability during traffic spikes.
Reserving capacity for the RDS database and the minimum number of EC2 instances ensures predictable cost savings while maintaining the necessary resources to handle base load and unexpected spikes, optimizing costs without sacrificing reliability.
Reducing the RDS instance size to db.r4.xlarge may lead to insufficient resources to handle application data needs, especially during traffic spikes. Additionally, while read replicas can improve read performance, they do not replace the need for adequate main instance capacity.
Reserving capacity for all EC2 instances is a good approach, but leveraging Spot Instance pricing for RDS databases is not viable as RDS does not support Spot Instances. Thus, this option is not feasible for reducing costs.
I guess:
Reserve capacity for the RDS database and the minimum number of EC2 instances that are constantly running.
I draft that the answer is:
Reserve capacity for the RDS database and the minimum number of EC2 instances that are constantly running.