AWS Certified Developer Associate DVA-C02 Practice Question

A t3.micro instance is a current-generation burstable-performance instance with 2 vCPUs, 1 GiB of RAM, and a 10 percent baseline CPU allocation. Because T3 instances launch in Unlimited mode by default, the CPU can burst above the baseline for as long as needed; if sustained, surplus credits are billed at a small additional rate. Its on-demand price (≈ $0.010 per hour in us-east-1) is less than one quarter of a t2.medium, delivering significant savings while meeting the observed 500 MiB memory requirement.

• t3.small doubles the memory and baseline CPU of t3.micro and costs roughly twice as much, offering no benefit to this lightly loaded workload.
• t4g.micro is even cheaper but uses the Arm-based Graviton processor; switching requires validating that application binaries and any third-party libraries are compatible.
• t2.small is an older generation with only 1 vCPU and the same price as a t3.micro, providing lower performance per dollar and no technical advantage.

Therefore, t3.micro maximizes savings without sacrificing the ability to burst when necessary.