SAA-C03 Q617 · Cost

Question

A company has multiple Amazon RDS DB instances that run in a development AWS account. All the instances have tags to identify them as development resources. The company needs the development DB instances to run on a schedule only during business hours. Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?

Accepted Answer

**Option D: Amazon EventBridge rule + AWS Lambda** is the best solution because:

1. **Schedule-based trigger**: EventBridge (formerly CloudWatch Events) natively supports **cron expressions** and **rate expressions**, making it perfect for time-based scheduling like 'start at 8 AM, stop at 6 PM'.

2. **Lambda for execution**: Lambda functions can call the RDS `StartDBInstance` and `StopDBInstance` APIs. The function can filter instances by their development tags to target only the correct resources.

3. **Least operational overhead**: This is a fully serverless, event-driven architecture. No servers to manage, no polling, no unnecessary alarms. EventBridge fires at the scheduled time → Lambda runs → RDS instances start/stop.

4. **Step-by-step flow**:
   - Create two EventBridge scheduled

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