AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional SAP-C02 Practice Question

The correct answer is to purchase a combination of Savings Plans. EC2 Instance Savings Plans offer the highest discount (up to 72%) but are limited to a specific instance family and AWS Region. This makes them ideal for the company's stable and predictable m5.4xlarge workload in us-east-1, maximizing savings for that portion. Compute Savings Plans offer a slightly lower discount (up to 66%) but provide significant flexibility, as they apply to EC2, Fargate, and Lambda usage across any region, instance family, or size. This makes them perfect for the growing and fluctuating microservices workload. This hybrid strategy achieves the highest overall savings by matching the right plan to the right workload characteristic, while still providing flexibility for the dynamic parts of the architecture.

• Purchasing only a Compute Savings Plan is a valid but suboptimal strategy. While it provides maximum flexibility, it forgoes the higher discount that an EC2 Instance Savings Plan offers for the stable, predictable EC2 workload, thus not maximizing savings.
• Purchasing only EC2 Instance Savings Plans is incorrect because these plans do not apply to AWS Fargate or AWS Lambda usage. This would leave a significant and growing portion of the company's compute spend without any discount.
• Using Convertible RIs and Spot Instances is a plausible cost-saving strategy, but relying entirely on Spot for production Fargate and Lambda tasks introduces significant operational risk due to potential interruptions. This may not be suitable for all production workloads and does not fully address the request to create a comprehensive plan that effectively covers all compute usage with a reliable discount model.