AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 372

A solutions architect is designing an architecture to run a third-party database server. The database software is memory intensive and has a CPU-based licensing model where the cost increases with the number of vCPU cores within the operating system. The solutions architect must select an Amazon EC2 instance with sufficient memory to run the database software, but the selected instance has a large number of vCPUs. The solutions architect must ensure that the vCPUs will not be underutilized and must minimize costs.
Which solution meets these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Select and launch a smaller EC2 instance with an appropriate number of vCPUs.
• B. Configure the CPU cores and threads on the selected EC2 instance during instance launch.
• C. Create a new EC2 instance and ensure multithreading is enabled when configuring the instance details.
• D. Create a new Capacity Reservation and select the appropriate instance type. Launch the instance into this new Capacity Reservation.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Selecting a smaller EC2 instance with an appropriate number of vCPUs directly reduces licensing costs and resource underutilization by aligning the instance's hardware profile with the database's actual CPU requirements. Other options, such as using Capacity Reservations or enabling multithreading, do not resolve the licensing overhead associated with over-provisioned vCPUs.