AWS Pricing Calculator

Correct Answer: The total amount of data storage required, considering both the size and growth rate of the data over time.

When estimating costs for Amazon S3 using the AWS Pricing Calculator, the primary factor to consider is the total amount of data storage required. This includes both the current size of the data and the expected growth rate over time. S3 pricing is based on the amount of data stored, so accurately estimating the storage requirements is crucial for accurate cost estimation. The number of requests made to S3 buckets, such as PUT, COPY, POST, LIST, and GET, can incur additional charges beyond the data storage costs. However, these costs are typically lower compared to the storage costs and may vary depending on the specific usage patterns. Data transfer between S3 and EC2 instances within the same AWS Region is free of charge, so it does not significantly impact the cost estimation. Enabling server-side encryption for S3 objects is provided at no extra charge by AWS, so it does not affect the cost estimation either. Therefore, focusing on the total data storage requirements is the most critical factor for accurate cost estimation when using the AWS Pricing Calculator for Amazon S3.

Correct Answer: The number and type of EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones

When estimating the cost of a highly available and fault-tolerant application using the AWS Pricing Calculator, the most important factor to consider is the number and type of EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones. Distributing instances across multiple Availability Zones ensures high availability and fault tolerance, but it also impacts the overall cost. Different instance types have varying prices, and running instances in multiple Availability Zones can increase costs. The other factors, such as data transfer between instances in the same Availability Zone, EBS volume storage capacity, and the number of Elastic IP addresses, have a relatively smaller impact on the total cost compared to the number and type of EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones.

Correct Answer: Amazon Redshift

When using the AWS Pricing Calculator to estimate the cost of a data warehouse solution, Amazon Redshift should be the primary focus. Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service designed for large-scale data storage and analysis. It is optimized for high-performance querying of large datasets. Amazon S3 is an object storage service, not a data warehousing solution. While it can store large amounts of data, it lacks the querying and analysis capabilities of Redshift. Amazon EC2 instances can be used for various workloads, but they are not specifically designed for data warehousing like Redshift is. Amazon RDS is a relational database service, which is suitable for transactional workloads and operational databases. However, for large-scale data warehousing and analysis, Redshift is the more appropriate choice in the AWS ecosystem.