Optimizing Your AWS Environment for Cost Efficiency

Reduce Cost in Your AWS Environment Without Impacting Availability

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Question

A company is running three production web server reserved EC2 instances with EBS-backed root volumes.

These instances have a consistent CPU load of 80%

Traffic is being distributed to these instances by an Elastic Load Balancer.

They also have their corresponding production and development Multi-AZ RDS MySQL databases.

What recommendation would you make to reduce cost in this environment without affecting availability of mission-critical systems? Choose the correct answer from the options given below.

Answers

Explanations

Click on the arrows to vote for the correct answer

A. B. C. D.

Answer - B.

Multi-AZ databases is better for production environments rather than for development environments, so you can reduce costs by not using this for development environments.

Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployments provide enhanced availability and durability for Database (DB) Instances, making them a natural fit for production database workloads.

When you provision a Multi-AZ DB Instance, Amazon RDS automatically creates a primary DB Instance and synchronously replicates the data to a standby instance in a different Availability Zone (AZ)

Each AZ runs on its own physically distinct, independent infrastructure, and is engineered to be highly reliable.

In case of an infrastructure failure, Amazon RDS performs an automatic failover to the standby (or to a read replica in the case of Amazon Aurora), so that you can resume database operations as soon as the failover is complete.

Since the endpoint for your DB Instance remains the same after a failover, your application can resume database operation without the need for manual administrative intervention.

For more information on Multi-AZ RDS, please refer to the below link:

https://aws.amazon.com/rds/details/multi-az/

The question is asking for a recommendation to reduce cost in a production environment without affecting availability of mission-critical systems.

Option A suggests using on-demand instances instead of reserved EC2 instances. Reserved instances offer significant cost savings compared to on-demand instances, but require upfront payments. If the company is consistently using these instances, switching to on-demand instances will increase the cost and is not recommended. Therefore, option A is not a viable solution.

Option B suggests not using a Multi-AZ RDS deployment for the development database. This option may save cost, but it may also affect the availability and durability of the development database in case of any failure. Therefore, it is not recommended as it may affect the development team's productivity.

Option C suggests using spot instances instead of reserved EC2 instances. Spot instances offer significant cost savings compared to reserved or on-demand instances, but they are not suitable for production workloads as their availability is not guaranteed and they can be terminated at any time by AWS. This option is also not recommended as it may affect the availability of mission-critical systems.

Option D suggests removing the Elastic Load Balancer. This option is not recommended as it will affect the availability of the web servers. If the Elastic Load Balancer is removed, the traffic will not be distributed evenly among the web servers, and the end-users may experience issues with accessing the application.

Therefore, none of the options are viable. A better approach to reduce cost in this environment would be to analyze the current resource utilization and consider rightsizing the instances based on the CPU and memory utilization. This will reduce the cost without affecting the availability of mission-critical systems. Additionally, considering the use of AWS Savings Plans or Reserved Instances with no upfront payment options may also help in reducing the cost.