AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 619

A company uses AWS Cost Explorer to monitor its AWS costs. The company notices that Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) storage and snapshot costs increase every month. However, the company does not purchase additional EBS storage every month. The company wants to optimize monthly costs for its current storage usage.

Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?

Answer options

• A. Use logs in Amazon CloudWatch Logs to monitor the storage utilization of Amazon EBS. Use Amazon EBS Elastic Volumes to reduce the size of the EBS volumes.
• B. Use a custom script to monitor space usage. Use Amazon EBS Elastic Volumes to reduce the size of the EBS volumes.
• C. Delete all expired and unused snapshots to reduce snapshot costs.
• D. Delete all nonessential snapshots. Use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager to create and manage the snapshots according to the company's snapshot policy requirements.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager provides an automated, low-overhead solution to manage EBS snapshots, ensuring that outdated snapshots are systematically deleted according to retention policies. Manual deletion of snapshots as suggested in Option C introduces high operational overhead and is prone to errors. Furthermore, options A and B are technically unfeasible because Amazon EBS Elastic Volumes does not support shrinking a volume's size directly.