A startup company just hired you as an AWS solutions architect. Your manager has assigned you a task to lower down AWS resources` costs due to a limited budget. In the meantime, the service should not be impacted when the cost reduction activities are performed. For example, idle load balancers can be safely deleted to save costs without service impact. Which way can quickly help you to identify ways to optimize the cost?

Answer options:

A.Launch Cost Explorer which can graph, visualize, and analyze the spend and then identify the services to be optimized.
B.Configure AWS Cost and Usage Reports and then analyze the AWS costs as well as the specific product offerings and usage amounts underlying those costs.
C.Check the Billing details which list all AWS service charges. Identify and optimize the services that have an unreasonable cost.
D.Search for the recommended actions in the Trusted Advisor Cost Optimization dashboard.

Correct Answer – D
There are various tools that are billing or cost-related. However, the quickest way to identify the possibilities to optimize costs is to use the Trusted Advisor Cost Optimization dashboard.
Option A is incorrect: Because Cost Explorer does not directly tell which services can be adjusted to save cost.
Option B is incorrect: Although AWS Cost and Usage Reports can provide the cost report in a detailed way, you still need to dig into the resources to differentiate which ones can help save cost.
Option C is incorrect: This can help if a few resources are used. However, more analysis is required to understand how to optimize the spend if compared with Option
D.Option D is CORRECT: Because the Cost Optimization dashboard quickly checks several cost-related items, including Low Utilization Amazon EC2 Instances, Underutilized Amazon EBS Volumes, Idle Load Balancers, Unassociated Elastic IP Addresses, etc.