Exam AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate SAA-C03 topic 1 question 677 discussion

I think the question is easy to misunderstand, whether you should create the whole setup or just the development cluster. But from the wording ("The [production] EKS cluster has (!) managed node groups ... The company needs a dedicated EKS cluster for development work"), I conclude that we should only create the development cluster. As this will be used "infrequently" for testing purposes only, and it must be "most cost-effective", I'd go with A - new cluster with "one managed node group that contains only Spot instances".

This question is convoluted and missing some details. We need: - control plane running on on-demand EC2s - worker nodes running on spot instances Read this to understand correct solution: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/amazon-eks-now-supports-provisioning-and-managing-ec2-spot-instances-in-managed-node-groups/

The answer should be B, because you could lose the entire spot instances in development and then the developers complain to the CIO and then the CIO fires you for putting everything on spot instances trying to save money, but instead causing an outage that cost the company ten times more if you would have just done a decent job and thought through the real-life situation.

The balance of node groups instances is the best option, for example the cluster has one on-demand EKS managed node group for cluster management and operational tools. This is where customers run workloads like datastores, monitoring tools, and any applications that are not interruption tolerant and needs to remain available. The cluster also should have multiple EKS managed node groups with Spot Instances, each diversified with similarly sized instance types, in order to tap into multiple Spot capacity pools. This solution, you make sure during the test of production application that the Spot Instances interruption will not affected the results. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/amazon-eks-now-supports-provisioning-and-managing-ec2-spot-instances-in-managed-node-groups/

this is one stupid question with a lot of fluff. The question is around the dev cluster, the answer is A.

in the exam.... answer A is too easy... AWS want the candidate to apply the two workload... the PROD vs DEV...

infrequently + cost effective -> Spot

For a development Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) cluster that is used infrequently to test application resiliency, the most cost-effective solution is to create a managed node group consisting solely of Spot Instances (Option A). Spot Instances offer significant cost savings—up to 90% compared to On-Demand Instances—making them ideal for non-critical, intermittent workloads like development and testing.

I'll go with B because no matter what production should not go in spot instances

Clearly prod and dev are two different envs and two separate EKS cluster. In order to do meaningful resilience test, dev must matches the prod, so D is the answer.

If we look closer to the last requirement "The EKS cluster must manage all the nodes." Option B is the only feasable and cost-effective one.

Based on the document [1], we can know that only self-managed node group can deploy the container on EC2 dedicated hosts . Which mean that customer need to manually create launch template, auto scaling group, and register it to the EKS cluster. The creation process should be same as general EC2 auto scaling creation. For now, EKS managed node group only supported on-demand and spot. MOST cost-effectively: *Spot Instances* https://repost.aws/questions/QUugoX4f1gRHW0MGHRTHFFFA/how-to-create-eks-cluster-with-dedicated-host-node-group

"The company will use the development cluster infrequently to test the resiliency of the application" = Spot instances = cost effective

The keywords are infrequent and resiliency.. This solution allows you to have a mix of On-Demand Instances and Spot Instances within the same EKS cluster. You can use the On-Demand Instances for the development work where you need dedicated resources and then leverage Spot Instances for testing the resiliency of the application. Spot Instances are generally more cost-effective but can be terminated with short notice, so using a combination of On-Demand and Spot Instances provides a balance between cost savings and stability. Option A (Create a managed node group that contains only Spot Instances) might be cost-effective, but it could introduce potential challenges for tasks that require dedicated resources and might not be the best fit for all scenarios.

The GBT vote A, I know the spot instance is the cheapest, but the question says "dedicated EKS cluster for development", so I vote B

Option A leverages the cost savings of Spot Instances, which is ideal for a development environment where the application is tested infrequently, and there is flexibility in when the nodes can be interrupted. This aligns with the goal of cost-efficiency and takes advantage of EKS's ability to manage the nodes directly.

B is the best ans.