You are working in a consulting company, and you have a customer who is a heavy AWS user. Recently the customer is unhappy with the increasing cost of AWS usage and has consulted you on how to find out solutions to optimize the costs. Which approaches can you recommend to the customer while making sure the service is not impacted? (Select TWO.)

Answer options:

A.Use Compute Optimizer to choose the optimal Amazon EC2 instance types based on your utilization data.
B.To save the cost of the VPN connections between VPC and on-premises servers, replace the VPN connections with a Direct Connect that is cheaper and also more reliable.
C.For non-production environments, use the default General Purpose SSD (gp2) instead of EBS Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) storage as SSD costs half the price.
D.To save cost, use spot instances instead of on-demand instances for Jenkins that manages the production CI/CD pipelines.
E.Turn off certain non-production instances during weekends when no one uses them and turns on these instances on Monday morning.

Correct Answer – A, E
AWS documentation in https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-technical-content/latest/cost-optimization-laying-the-foundation/cost-optimization-pillars.html has introduced the pillars for Cost Optimization. Please check this document for related details.
Option A is CORRECT: Because this is a way to dig out existing CloudWatch data and get recommendations for the right size of EC2 instances. Please refer to https://aws.amazon.com/compute-optimizer/ for the implementation.
 You can take advantage of the recommendations in Compute Optimizer to reduce costs by up to 25%. Compute Optimizer analyzes the configuration and resource utilization of a workload to identify AWS compute resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances, that might be under-provisioned or over-provisioned. Compute Optimizer then recommends you to right-size your AWS compute resources and switch to a different instance size or instance type to save costs. 
Option B is incorrect: Because Direct Connect may cost much more than VPN connections. It also depends on which kind of services are used before deciding on Direct Connect or VPN. However, in most cases, Direct Connect is not cost-efficient.
Option C is incorrect: Because HDD (st1) is actually cheaper than SSD (gp2). So using SSD is not cost-efficient.
Option D is incorrect: Because spot instances cannot ensure the service. So they are not recommended for production environments.
Option E is CORRECT: Because unused EC2 instances can be stopped to save cost. A script or a pipeline can automatically execute this task to stop and start the instances appropriately.