AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 532

A company wants to monitor its AWS costs for financial review. The cloud operations team is designing an architecture in the AWS Organizations management account to query AWS Cost and Usage Reports for all member accounts. The team must run this query once a month and provide a detailed analysis of the bill.
Which solution is the MOST scalable and cost-effective way to meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Enable Cost and Usage Reports in the management account. Deliver reports to Amazon Kinesis. Use Amazon EMR for analysis.
• B. Enable Cost and Usage Reports in the management account. Deliver the reports to Amazon S3. Use Amazon Athena for analysis.
• C. Enable Cost and Usage Reports for member accounts. Deliver the reports to Amazon S3. Use Amazon Redshift for analysis.
• D. Enable Cost and Usage Reports for member accounts. Deliver the reports to Amazon Kinesis. Use Amazon QuickSight for analysis.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Enabling AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) in the management account automatically aggregates billing data for all member accounts into a single Amazon S3 bucket. Using Amazon Athena to query this data directly in S3 is highly cost-effective and scalable because it is a serverless service that only incurs costs per query run. Other options using Amazon EMR, Amazon Redshift, or Amazon Kinesis introduce unnecessary infrastructure complexity and high ongoing costs for a task performed only once a month.