A company runs development, testing, and production environments 24/7 in eu-west-1 using stateful EC2 instances and Amazon RDS for MySQL. Databases are 500–800 GB. Development and testing teams work business hours on business days; production runs continuously. All resources have an environment tag (development, testing, or production). The company wants to lower costs with the least operational effort. What should a solutions architect implement?

The correct option minimizes costs by stopping non-production instances outside business hours, leveraging EventBridge and Lambda for automation. This approach reduces EC2 and RDS costs for development and testing environments without affecting the 24/7 production environment. Using separate rules for stopping and starting is a common, clear pattern for scheduled operations. The first incorrect option, using a single daily rule, is less efficient and more complex to manage for distinct start/stop times. The third incorrect option, terminating and restoring instances, is highly disruptive and costly due to data loss (for stateful instances) and the time required for restoration, which is not suitable for stateful EC2 instances and RDS databases. The fourth incorrect option, running hourly and terminating/restoring, is even more disruptive and inefficient than the third, incurring high operational overhead and potential data loss.