AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (legacy) — Question 896

An organization has been running their website on several m2 Linux instances behind a Classic Load Balancer for more than two years. Traffic and utilization have been constant and predictable.
What should the organization do to reduce costs?

Answer options

• A. Purchase Reserved Instances for the specific m2 instances.
• B. Change the m2 instances to equivalent m5 types, and purchase Reserved Instances for the specific m5 instances.
• C. Change the Classic Load Balancer to an Application Load Balancer, and purchase Reserved Instances for the specific m2 instances.
• D. Purchase Spot Instances for the specific m2 instances.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Since the workload has been constant and predictable for over two years, purchasing Reserved Instances for the active m2 instances provides an immediate and significant cost reduction compared to On-Demand pricing. Spot Instances are not suitable for this scenario as they can be interrupted, which threatens the availability of a steady-state website. While migrating to newer instance types or load balancers could offer other optimizations, purchasing Reserved Instances for the existing setup is the most direct way to safely lower costs for this stable workload.