AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 840

An enterprise runs 103 line-of-business applications on virtual machines in an on-premises data center. Many of the applications are simple PHP, Java, or Ruby web applications, are no longer actively developed, and serve little traffic.
Which approach should be used to migrate these applications to AWS with the LOWEST infrastructure costs?

Answer options

• A. Deploy the applications to single-instance AWS Elastic Beanstalk environments without a load balancer.
• B. Use AWS SMS to create AMIs for each virtual machine and run them in Amazon EC2.
• C. Convert each application to a Docker image and deploy to a small Amazon ECS cluster behind an Application Load Balancer.
• D. Use VM Import/Export to create AMIs for each virtual machine and run them in single-instance AWS Elastic Beanstalk environments by configuring a custom image.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Deploying 103 individual EC2 instances or Beanstalk environments would result in high idle costs for low-traffic applications. Containerizing the applications into Docker images and hosting them on a small Amazon ECS cluster allows for high resource density, which significantly minimizes infrastructure costs. This consolidation behind a single Application Load Balancer using path-based routing is the most cost-effective approach.