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1. A company has 12 AWS accounts across three business units. The CFO wants to receive a single monthly invoice and take advantage of combined usage discounts. Which AWS feature should the cloud architect enable?
- A.AWS Organizations Consolidated Billing, which combines all member account charges into one payer account invoice and aggregates usage to unlock volume pricing tiers.✓ Correct
- B.AWS Cost Explorer, which visualizes spending trends across accounts and provides rightsizing recommendations to reduce overall costs.
- C.AWS Budgets, which sets spending thresholds per account and sends alerts when any individual account exceeds its allocated budget.
- D.AWS Trusted Advisor, which identifies underutilized resources across all accounts and generates a consolidated cost savings report.
Explanation
Consolidated Billing merges all member account charges into a single payer account invoice and aggregates usage across accounts, qualifying the organization for volume discount tiers (e.g., S3, EC2 Reserved Instances) that individual accounts could not reach alone.
2. An organization uses Consolidated Billing with 8 member accounts. Several accounts purchase EC2 Reserved Instances that they do not fully utilize. How does Consolidated Billing handle unused Reserved Instance capacity?
- A.Unused Reserved Instance discounts are automatically shared across all member accounts in the organization, reducing on-demand charges for matching instance usage in other accounts.✓ Correct
- B.Unused Reserved Instance capacity is refunded to the payer account at the end of each billing cycle, compensating for any idle reservation costs.
- C.Each member account retains Reserved Instance discounts exclusively; unused capacity cannot be shared with other accounts under Consolidated Billing.
- D.AWS automatically converts unused Reserved Instances into Savings Plans and applies them to the highest-spending member account in the organization.
Explanation
Consolidated Billing enables Reserved Instance sharing: if one member account has unused RI capacity, the discount automatically applies to matching on-demand usage in other member accounts, maximizing the value of purchased reservations across the organization.
3. A FinOps team needs to attribute AWS costs precisely to individual projects and departments for internal chargeback reporting. Which approach best enables this cost allocation?
- A.Apply cost allocation tags to every resource (up to 50 tags per resource) and activate them in Billing preferences so they appear as filterable columns in Cost Explorer and detailed billing reports.✓ Correct
- B.Create a separate AWS account for each project and department, then use Consolidated Billing to aggregate all costs into a single monthly invoice for accounting.
- C.Use AWS Config rules to enforce naming conventions on all resources, then parse resource names in billing reports to infer project and department ownership.
- D.Enable AWS Trusted Advisor cost checks to automatically categorize all resource spending by project based on instance type and usage patterns.
Explanation
Cost allocation tags (up to 50 per resource) that are activated in the Billing console appear as filterable dimensions in Cost Explorer and detailed billing reports, enabling precise chargeback to projects, departments, or cost centers without requiring separate accounts.
4. A cloud governance team discovers that 40% of EC2 instances have no cost allocation tags, making departmental chargeback impossible. Which combination of AWS services should they implement to enforce and verify tagging compliance?
- A.Use AWS Config with a required-tags managed rule to detect untagged resources and AWS Organizations tag policies to enforce consistent tag keys and values across all member accounts.✓ Correct
- B.Enable AWS Cost Explorer tag coverage reports and manually review them weekly, then email non-compliant teams a list of their untagged resources for remediation.
- C.Create IAM permission boundaries that prevent teams from launching EC2 instances entirely, forcing them to submit resource requests through a tagging-compliant provisioning portal.
- D.Use Amazon CloudWatch Events to trigger a Lambda function that terminates any EC2 instance launched without the required cost allocation tags within five minutes of creation.
Explanation
AWS Config's required-tags managed rule continuously evaluates resources for tag compliance and flags violations, while Organizations tag policies enforce standardized tag keys and values at scale — together providing automated detection and governance without manual review cycles.
5. A startup wants to receive an email notification whenever its total AWS monthly spend is forecasted to exceed $5,000. Which service combination should the cloud architect configure?
- A.Create an AWS Budget with a forecasted-spend threshold of $5,000 and configure an Amazon SNS topic as the alert action so notifications are delivered to subscribed email addresses when the forecast breaches the threshold.✓ Correct
- B.Set up an Amazon CloudWatch billing alarm with a $5,000 threshold and configure an SNS topic to send email notifications when the alarm state changes to ALARM.
- C.Enable AWS Cost Anomaly Detection with a $5,000 sensitivity threshold and subscribe an SNS topic to deliver anomaly alerts to the team email distribution list.
- D.Configure an AWS Lambda function that queries Cost Explorer daily and publishes a message to an SNS topic if the month-to-date spend projection exceeds $5,000.
Explanation
AWS Budgets supports forecasted-spend budget types that project end-of-month costs and trigger alerts before actual spend occurs. Pairing it with an SNS topic action delivers proactive email notifications to all subscribers, enabling teams to act before the threshold is breached.
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