A company is running its application in the AWS Cloud. The company wants to periodically review its AWS account for cost optimization opportunities…

AWS Trusted Advisor is the most appropriate service for this requirement. It acts as an automated expert that inspects a user's AWS environment and provides real-time recommendations based on AWS best practices. One of its five core pillars is "Cost Optimization." In this category, Trusted Advisor identifies specific opportunities to reduce spending, such as flagging idle load balancers, underutilized Amazon EC2 instances, and unassociated Elastic IP addresses. This directly addresses the company's need to periodically review its account for cost-saving opportunities.

A. AWS Cost Explorer: This service is primarily for visualizing, understanding, and forecasting your AWS costs and usage over time, not for providing proactive optimization recommendations across a broad range of services.

C. AWS Pricing: This refers to the information on service costs, often used with the AWS Pricing Calculator to estimate future expenses, rather than reviewing an existing account for savings.

D. AWS Budgets: This tool is used to set custom cost and usage thresholds and receive alerts when they are breached. It helps in monitoring and controlling spending, not in identifying optimization opportunities.

---

1. AWS Trusted Advisor Documentation: "AWS Trusted Advisor is a service that provides real-time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices... Trusted Advisor provides recommendations across five categories: cost optimization

performance

security

fault tolerance

and service quotas."

Source: AWS Documentation

"What is AWS Trusted Advisor?"

Section: "How Trusted Advisor works".

2. AWS Cost Explorer Documentation: "AWS Cost Explorer has an easy-to-use interface that lets you visualize

understand

and manage your AWS costs and usage over time."

Source: AWS Documentation

"What is AWS Cost Explorer?".

3. AWS Billing and Cost Management Documentation: "With AWS Budgets

you can set custom budgets to track your cost and usage... and receive alerts when you exceed (or are forecasted to exceed) your budget."

Source: AWS Documentation

"Managing your costs with AWS Budgets".

4. AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) Exam Guide: The exam guide lists AWS Trusted Advisor under the domain of "Security and Compliance" but its functions

particularly cost optimization

are a key topic. It also lists Cost Explorer and Budgets under "Technology and Services

" highlighting their distinct roles in cost management versus cost optimization advice.

Source: AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) Exam Guide

Page 7

"Domain 3: Technology and Services" and "Domain 4: Security and Compliance".