AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 509

A company has many projects that run in multiple AWS Regions. The projects usually have a three-tier architecture with Amazon EC2 instances that run behind an Application Load Balancer. The instances run in an Auto Scaling group and share Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) storage and Amazon RDS databases. Some projects have resources in more than one Region.
A solutions architect needs to identify each project's individual costs.
Which solution will provide this information with the LEAST amount of operational effort?

Answer options

• A. Use Cost Explorer to perform one-time queries for each Region and create a report that filters by project.
• B. Use the AWS Billing and Cost Management details page to see the actual usage costs of the resources by project.
• C. Use AWS Systems Manager to group resources by project and monitor each project's resources and cost.
• D. Use AWS Billing and Cost Management to activate cost allocation tags and create reports that are based on the project tags.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Activating cost allocation tags in AWS Billing and Cost Management allows the organization to automatically categorize and track resource costs across different regions and services by project-specific tags with minimal ongoing effort. Other options, such as performing manual queries in Cost Explorer for each region or using AWS Systems Manager, require significant operational overhead and do not scale well. Once tags are activated, AWS automatically aggregates the billing data, making it straightforward to generate comprehensive cost reports per project.