Amazon Web Services SOA-C03 Exam With Confidence Using Practice Dumps

The requirement is to produce cost optimization recommendations for EBS volumes based on IOPS and throughput, and to do so with the most operational efficiency across potentially many instances and volumes. AWS Compute Optimizer is the most suitable service because it analyzes historical utilization metrics and configuration characteristics to generate rightsizing recommendations. When enabled, Compute Optimizer evaluates EBS volume performance patterns (including throughput and IOPS consumption) and can recommend more appropriate volume types or settings to reduce cost while meeting performance needs.

Option C is operationally efficient because it centralizes analysis. Instead of manually inspecting per-volume graphs, Compute Optimizer aggregates and evaluates data over time, reducing human effort and improving consistency. After sufficient observation time, the CloudOps engineer can review the findings and translate them into concrete actions such as reducing provisioned IOPS on io1/io2, selecting gp3 with tuned IOPS/throughput, or resizing volumes that are over-provisioned relative to actual demand.

Option A is manual and does not directly address IOPS/throughput rightsizing; it also incorrectly focuses on consumed space versus provisioned space, which is more relevant to capacity than performance provisioning. Option B is unrelated: EBS-optimized is an EC2 feature for dedicated EBS bandwidth and does not rightsize EBS volume performance or reduce over-provisioned IOPS/throughput. Option D introduces significant operational overhead by installing benchmarking tools and running synthetic tests, which is not scalable, can affect production performance, and still may not reflect real workload patterns.

Therefore, enabling AWS Compute Optimizer and using its EBS volume recommendations is the most operationally efficient approach.

When a CloudFormation stack is deleted, CloudFormation’s default behavior is to delete the resources it created, including EC2 instances and attached resources defined in the template. The requirement is explicit: the company must keep the instances and all of the instances’ data even if someone deletes the stack. The CloudFormation mechanism intended for this outcome is the DeletionPolicy attribute, which controls what happens to a resource when the stack is deleted or when the resource is replaced during an update.

Setting DeletionPolicy: Retain on the EC2 instance resource instructs CloudFormation to preserve that resource instead of deleting it during stack deletion. With Retain, CloudFormation removes the resource from stack management but leaves the instance running (and therefore keeps the data that remains on the instance and its configured storage). This directly satisfies the requirement because the instance is not terminated as part of stack deletion.

Option A is incorrect for EC2 instances because Snapshot is applicable to certain resource types (commonly storage and database resources where snapshot semantics exist), not as a general “keep my instance” control for EC2 instance resources. Options B and C (DLM and AWS Backup) are valuable for backup and recovery strategies, but they do not prevent CloudFormation from terminating the instances when the stack is deleted. Backups could help restore later, but the requirement is to keep the original instances and their data even after deletion of the stack.

Therefore, the correct solution is to set DeletionPolicy to Retain for the EC2 instance resource in the CloudFormation template.

The AWS Cloud Operations and Infrastructure-as-Code documentation specifies that when using AWS CloudFormation, resources are created in parallel by default unless explicitly ordered using DependsOn.

If a custom resource (Lambda) depends on another resource (like an EC2 instance) to exist before execution, a DependsOn attribute must be added to enforce creation order. This ensures the EC2 instance is launched and available before the custom resource executes its automation logic.

Updating the service token (Option B) doesn’t affect order of execution. The cfn-response module (Option C) handles callback communication but not sequencing. Fn::If (Option D) is for conditional creation, not dependency control.

Therefore, Option A is correct — adding a DependsOn attribute guarantees that CloudFormation provisions the EC2 instance before executing the Lambda custom resource.