Q: Your On-Demand EC2 costs are very high. How would you optimize?
1. Reserved Instances (RI) — commit to 1 or 3 years for 40-60% discount. Best for steady-state production workloads.
#AWS #EC2 & Compute #L3 #Cloud #Infrastructure #EC2
🎙️ Candidate Opening & Architectural Context
""When an interviewer asks how I troubleshoot this in AWS, I frame it through my hands-on production experience. When addressing this question, I walk the interviewer through our production incident runbook: isolating the blast radius, checking diagnostic logs and metrics, and applying a safe fix.""
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🛠️ Production Runbook & Step-by-Step Resolution
1️⃣
Initial Diagnostics & Root Cause Analysis
- Reserved Instances (RI) — commit to 1 or 3 years for 40-60% discount. Best for steady-state production workloads.
- Savings Plans — more flexible than RIs. Commit to $/hour spend, apply across any instance type.
- Spot Instances — up to 90% discount. For fault-tolerant workloads (batch jobs, CI/CD workers, stateless web tier).
- Right-sizing — use AWS Compute Optimizer. Many instances are over-provisioned.
2️⃣
Remediation & Permanent Safeguards
## 🔵 S3 & Storage
- Graviton instances — ARM-based (m7g, c7g) are 20-40% cheaper than x86 equivalents.
- Auto Scaling — scale in during off-hours. Don't run 10 instances at 2 AM if traffic drops to 1% of peak.
- S3 + CloudFront for static content — offload static serving from EC2.
💡 The Senior SRE Gold Nugget (Key Architectural Takeaway)
"Pro-Tip: Reserved Instances (RI) — commit to 1 or 3 years for 40-60% discount. Best for steady-state production workloads.."
⚡ 60-Second Elevator Pitch Talking Points
- Reserved Instances (RI) — commit to 1 or 3 years for 40-60% discount. Best for steady-state produ...
- Savings Plans — more flexible than RIs. Commit to $/hour spend, apply across any instance type.
- Spot Instances — up to 90% discount. For fault-tolerant workloads (batch jobs, CI/CD workers, sta...
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