Exam AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate SAA-C03 topic 1 question 128 discussion

Requirement is "minimizes cost and operational overhead" A is better option than B as EKS add additional cost and operational overhead.

Answer is A: Amazon ECS: ECS itself is free, you pay only for Amazon EC2 resources you use. Amazon EKS: The EKS management layer incurs an additional cost of $144 per month per cluster. Advantages of Amazon ECS include: Spot instances: Because containers are immutable, you can run many workloads using Amazon EC2 Spot Instances (which can be shut down with no advance notice) and save 90% on on-demand instance costs.

Why Option A is best: Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Group + Spot Instances: Spot Instances are highly cost-effective (up to 90% cheaper than On-Demand). Auto Scaling ensures automatic replacement of interrupted instances. Stateless nature of apps makes Spot a perfect fit. Operational overhead is low compared to running a full Kubernetes cluster (like EKS).

Answer is B since it’s less operational overhead to run containers on EKS (managed service) than running on EC2 instances which implies installing dockers to orchestrate containers)

ai response "Generally, an ECS EC2 Auto Scaling Group is considered cheaper than an EKS Managed Node Group because with ECS, you only pay for the EC2 instances used to run your containers, while EKS adds an additional cost per cluster hour on top of the compute costs for the managed nodes"

Definitely B. running containers on spot EC2 instances means there has to be additional configuration requirements every time an instance comes up. That means making a custom AMI with prepping the spot instance to launch the container = additional operational overhead in maintaining the AMI - with EKS, that overhead is eliminated.

Spot Instances are the cheapest and most suitable here along with EKS for automation and thereby reducing operational overhead.

Ans A - hint: "stateless" and 'don't care' infrastructure - so Spot and containerisation

Spot instance is definitely the answer for interruptible process. It's between A and B now. I would reckon Option B requires lesser operational overheads than to maintain own fleet of EC2 servers with containers.

B is correct

B for sure

IMHO, the option **B** is the right one. Breaking down the reasons for it: 1 - Spot is much cheaper than on-demand, which already eliminates C&D for cost related. 2 - Even though we can create a bootstrap script to install docker, managing this can be complicated, especially if any of the applications require more than one instance running.

Container in ec2 or container on a container platform? B

run applications in containers -> Container service not EC2 (no operational overhead to config container workload on EC2) Spot instance < On-demand cost

Does A implicitly means run spot Instance on ECS?

Spot instances for disruption friendly containers which are also cheaper. EKS allows using spot instances from a managed node group that takes away the EC2 operational overhead. Link: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/amazon-eks-now-supports-provisioning-and-managing-ec2-spot-instances-in-managed-node-groups/ "Previously, customers had to run Spot Instances as self-managed worker nodes in their EKS clusters. This meant doing some heavy lifting such as building and maintaining configuration for Spot Instances in EC2 Auto Scaling groups, deploying a tool for handling Spot interruptions gracefully, deploying AMI updates, and updating the kubelet version running on their worker nodes. Now, all you need to do is supply a single parameter to indicate that a managed node group should launch Spot Instances, and provide multiple instance types that would be used by the underlying EC2 Auto Scaling group."

A has less operational overhead