Amazon Web Services Updated SOA-C02 Exam Questions and Answers by ivy-rae

To reduce the cost of running the application without affecting availability or design, applying rightsizing recommendations from AWS Cost Explorer to reduce the instance size is the best approach.

Rightsizing Recommendations:

AWS Cost Explorer provides rightsizing recommendations that help you identify underutilized instances.

By resizing instances to a more appropriate size based on their utilization, you can reduce costs while maintaining performance.

Steps to Implement:

Open the AWS Cost Management console.

Navigate to "Cost Explorer" and select "Rightsizing Recommendations."

Review the recommendations and choose to resize the instances based on their actual usage.

Advantages:

Rightsizing ensures that you are not paying for unused resources while maintaining the necessary capacity and performance for your application.

References:

AWS Cost Explorer Rightsizing Recommendations

Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights allows you to interactively search and analyze your log data. This can be used to quickly identify the top internet destinations accessed by the EC2 instances.

Steps:

Open CloudWatch Logs Insights:

Open the Amazon CloudWatch console.

In the navigation pane, choose "Logs Insights".

Select the Log Group:

Select the log group that contains the VPC flow logs for the NAT gateway.

Run a Query:

Use the following query to identify the top five internet destinations:

sql

Copy code

fields @timestamp, dstAddr

| stats count(*) as requestCount by dstAddr

| sort requestCount desc

| limit 5

This query will count the number of requests to each destination address, sort them in descending order, and limit the results to the top five.

Analyze Results:

Review the output to identify the top five internet destinations that the EC2 instances communicate with for downloads.

References:

CloudWatch Logs Insights

Analyzing VPC Flow Logs with CloudWatch Logs Insights

To prevent the EC2 instances and their data from being deleted when a CloudFormation stack is deleted:

DeletionPolicy Attribute: In the CloudFormation template that defines the EC2 instances, set the DeletionPolicy attribute to Retain for each EC2 instance resource. This setting ensures that when the CloudFormation stack is deleted, the EC2 instances are not terminated.

Impact of the Retain Policy: With this policy, all data on the instance, such as data on its attached EBS volumes, remains intact even after the stack deletion. The resources will remain in your AWS account and will need to be managed or deleted manually thereafter.

This approach is directly supported by AWS CloudFormation and provides a simple and effective way to protect EC2 instances and their data during stack deletions.

To address the performance issues of a CPU-heavy application running on a t2.large EC2 instance, the best course of action is to upgrade to a compute-optimized instance. Compute-optimized instances provide a higher ratio of CPU resources compared to memory, making them ideal for applications that require high CPU performance.

Upgrade to a Compute-Optimized Instance:

Identify a suitable compute-optimized instance type, such as the c5.large, which offers better CPU performance compared to the t2.large.

Stop the current EC2 instance and change the instance type to the chosen compute-optimized instance.