Which steps should a Solutions Architect take to reduce costs?
Enable AWS Business Support and review AWS Trusted Advisor’s cost checks. Create Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups for applications that experience fluctuating demand. Save AWS Simple Monthly Calculator reports in Amazon S3 for trend analysis. Create a master account under Organizations and have teams join for consolidated billing.
Enable Cost Explorer and AWS Business Support. Reserve Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS DB instances. Use Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Trusted Advisor for monitoring and to receive cost-savings suggestions. Create a master account under Organizations and have teams join for consolidated billing.
Create an AWS Lambda function that changes the instance size based on Amazon CloudWatch alarms. Reserve instances based on AWS Simple Monthly Calculator suggestions. Have an AWS Well-Architected framework review and apply recommendations. Create a master account under Organizations and have teams join for consolidated billing.
Create a budget and monitor for costs exceeding the budget. Create Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups for applications that experience fluctuating demand. Create an AWS Lambda function that changes instance sizes based on Amazon CloudWatch alarms. Have each team upload their bill to an Amazon S3 bucket for analysis of team spending. Use Spot Instances on nightly batch processing jobs.
Explanations:
While enabling AWS Business Support and reviewing Trusted Advisor’s cost checks are good practices, relying solely on these without implementing specific cost-saving measures (like reserved instances or using Cost Explorer) may not yield significant savings. Also, creating a master account is beneficial but does not directly reduce costs.
This option provides a comprehensive approach to cost reduction by enabling Cost Explorer for visibility, reserving instances for lower pricing, using CloudWatch for monitoring, and consolidating billing for better management and potential savings.
Although this option suggests dynamically changing instance sizes and performing a Well-Architected review, it does not explicitly include reserving instances or using tools like Cost Explorer for better cost management, which are critical for effective cost reduction.
This option proposes several good practices, such as monitoring budgets and using Auto Scaling, but lacks the direct approach of reserving instances and using Cost Explorer for deeper analysis. The suggestion to have teams upload their bills may also complicate cost analysis instead of streamlining it.