What the exam asks
- Match the tool to the verb. Analyse or forecast is Cost Explorer. Alert or act on a threshold is Budgets. Get line-item detail is the CUR. Rightsize is Compute Optimizer. Find idle resources or best-practice gaps is Trusted Advisor.
- Allocate costs. Report spend per team, project or cost centre with cost allocation tags, and enforce tagging across accounts.
- Use multi-account billing. Consolidated billing, volume discounts, and sharing Reserved Instances and Savings Plans, including how to turn sharing off.
- Act on waste. Find idle and oversized resources and choose the order of optimisation: rightsize first, then commit.
Core ideas
The tool map
| Question in the stem | Tool | What it cannot do |
|---|---|---|
| “Visualise, filter and group spend; forecast; find RI or Savings Plans recommendations” | AWS Cost Explorer | Send alerts or take actions |
| “Notify or act when cost, usage, RI or Savings Plans coverage crosses a threshold (actual or forecast)” | AWS Budgets | Line-item analysis |
| “Most granular data: hourly line items, resource IDs, pricing, tags, for SQL or BI” | Cost and Usage Report (CUR 2.0 via AWS Data Exports) | Forecasting or alerting |
| “Rightsize EC2, Auto Scaling groups, EBS, Lambda memory, ECS on Fargate, RDS, with performance risk” | AWS Compute Optimizer | Unused Elastic IPs, idle load balancers |
| “Checks for idle load balancers, unassociated Elastic IPs, underused EBS volumes, low-use EC2, plus security, fault tolerance and service limits” | AWS Trusted Advisor | Deep ML rightsizing for many resource types |
| “Estimate the cost of an architecture before building it” |