AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 606

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 tor analysis.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Enabling AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) in the management account consolidates billing data for all member accounts into a single Amazon S3 bucket. Using Amazon Athena to analyze this data is highly cost-effective and scalable because Athena is serverless and charges only for the data scanned during the monthly query execution. Other alternatives, such as Amazon Redshift or Amazon EMR, require provisioning and maintaining infrastructure, which leads to unnecessary continuous costs.