A company wants to run stateless containerized applications in the AWS Cloud. The applications tolerate disruptions in the underlying infrastructure. The company needs a solution that minimizes cost and operational overhead. What should a solutions architect do?

The company needs a solution that minimizes cost and operational overhead for stateless, disruption-tolerant containerized applications. Spot Instances offer significant cost savings (up to 90% off On-Demand prices) and are ideal for fault-tolerant workloads, directly addressing the cost minimization requirement. Amazon EKS provides a managed Kubernetes service, which significantly reduces the operational overhead of managing the Kubernetes control plane. Using a managed node group further simplifies the management of worker nodes. Combining Spot Instances with EKS managed node groups is the optimal solution. Using Spot Instances in an EC2 Auto Scaling group would be cheaper than On-Demand, but it lacks the container orchestration capabilities and operational benefits of EKS. On-Demand Instances, whether in an Auto Scaling group or EKS, would incur higher costs and not leverage the tolerance for disruption.