AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner — Question 498

A company is running applications on Amazon EC2 instances in the same AWS account for several different projects. The company wants to track the infrastructure costs for each of the projects separately. The company must conduct this tracking with the least possible impact to the existing infrastructure and with no additional cost.

What should the company do to meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Use a different EC2 instance type for each project.
• B. Publish project-specific custom Amazon CloudWatch metrics for each application.
• C. Deploy EC2 instances for each project in a separate AWS account.
• D. Use cost allocation tags with values that are specific to each project.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Using cost allocation tags is a built-in, no-cost feature of AWS that allows organizations to categorize and track resource costs without altering their existing architecture. Setting up separate AWS accounts or changing instance types would cause significant operational disruption and overhead, violating the requirement for minimal impact. Custom Amazon CloudWatch metrics are not designed for financial cost tracking and would also incur additional API and storage charges.