AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Practice Exam

What is the best way for a media company to track costs for each S3 bucket in an AWS environment?

1. Implement a dedicated monitoring tool for S3 costs

2. Add a common tag to each bucket and activate it as a cost allocation tag

3. Use AWS Lambda for cost monitoring

4. Remove unnecessary S3 buckets to reduce costs

The correct answer is: Add a common tag to each bucket and activate it as a cost allocation tag

Adding a common tag to each S3 bucket and activating it as a cost allocation tag is the best approach for tracking costs associated with each bucket in an AWS environment. Cost allocation tags allow for granular tracking of AWS costs in your billing reports. When you apply a specific tag to an S3 bucket, that tag gets propagated through your AWS billing and cost management services, enabling you to see which costs correspond to which resources. This method allows for detailed financial analysis and reporting, as AWS provides the ability to filter and group your billing data based on these tags. Users can effectively categorize and visualize their S3 spending per bucket, making it easier to identify trends, control costs, and optimize storage strategies based on usage and expenses. While dedicated monitoring tools or AWS Lambda could serve certain purposes in cost management, they typically require additional configurations or integrations that do not directly link costs to specific S3 buckets in a straightforward manner. Additionally, removing unnecessary S3 buckets could lead to cost savings but does not provide a method to track expenses; it instead focuses on proactively reducing costs without offering visibility into existing cost distribution. Hence, using cost allocation tags is the most efficient and effective strategy for tracking expenses per S3 bucket.