AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 646

A company is developing an application that will run on a production Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) cluster. The EKS cluster has managed node groups that are provisioned with On-Demand Instances.

The company needs a dedicated EKS cluster for development work. The company will use the development cluster infrequently to test the resiliency of the application. The EKS cluster must manage all the nodes.

Which solution will meet these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

Answer options

• A. Create a managed node group that contains only Spot Instances.
• B. Create two managed node groups. Provision one node group with On-Demand Instances. Provision the second node group with Spot Instances.
• C. Create an Auto Scaling group that has a launch configuration that uses Spot Instances. Configure the user data to add the nodes to the EKS cluster.
• D. Create a managed node group that contains only On-Demand Instances.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Using two managed node groups (one with On-Demand and one with Spot Instances) allows the development cluster to maintain a baseline of stable On-Demand nodes while utilizing cheaper Spot Instances to cost-effectively test how the application handles node disruptions and resiliency. Option A is incorrect because a Spot-only cluster could lose all nodes simultaneously, disrupting basic cluster operations. Option C is incorrect because it uses self-managed Auto Scaling groups instead of letting the EKS cluster manage the nodes, and Option D is not the most cost-effective solution.