Network Transfer, Connectivity, and Edge Costs
Where this lesson fits
This lesson covers Domain 4: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures, Task 4.4: Design cost-optimized network architectures. Domain 4 represents 20% of the scored content of SAA-C03. Network cost is the one most architects forget until the bill arrives: NAT gateway processing fees, cross-AZ traffic, internet egress, and idle load balancers appear as surprising line items. Exam stems describe a topology and a traffic pattern and ask how to reduce charges without breaking security, availability, or performance.
Chapter 9 covered topology, connectivity, load balancing, and edge services from a performance angle. This lesson reuses the same services and asks what each one costs and where cheaper equivalents exist.