Account Management and Billing

Question 1

What features are available with Organizations (in acct Mgmt) ?

Answer 1

• Allows to manage multiple accounts (Master -> child)
• Consolidated billing, automate acct creation
• Aggregate usage (volume discounts)
• Service Control Policies
• Share the reserved EC2 instances amongst the member AWS accounts (*)

Question 2

What are Service Control Policies

Answer 2

• Can restrict account access privileges

Ex/ deny access to Athena (like in lab)

Question 3

What are Multi Account Strategies?

Answer 3

• Create accounts per department, cost center (common sense)
• this way there is better per account service limits and isolated logging
• Enable CloudTrail on al accounts => central S3 bucket
• CloudWatch Logs to central logging account

Question 4

• What are AWS Pricing Models

Answer 4

• Pay as you Go
• Save when you reserve (EC2, DynamoDB, Elasticache, RDS, Redshift)
• Pay less by using more
• Pay less as AWS grows

Question 5

• What are Free Tier Services?

Answer 5

• IAM
• VPC
• Consolidated Billing
• Free to use:
• Elastic Beanstalk
• CloudFormation
• AutoScaling Groups

Question 6

What is EC2 compute pricing?

Answer 6

• Only pay for what you use
• For On-demand
• 60 sec minimum
• Linux per second, Windows per hour
• Discount for Reserved instance
• Deep discount for Spot

Question 7

What is Lambda pricing?

Answer 7

• Per function call and duration

Question 8

What is S3 pricing?

Answer 8

• Tiered based on S3 class
• disk volume used
• Data transferred out (in free)
• Lifecycle transitions / restore requests

Question 9

What is EBS pricing?

Answer 9

• Volume type (general purpose SSD or Provisioned IOPS (more expensive)’
• Per GB provisioned
• Snapshots per GB/month
• Data in free, data out charged
• the number of IOPS provisioned per month,

Question 10

What is RDS pricing?

Answer 10

• Per hour
• DB properties (size, processor, memory)
• On demand vs Reserved
• Single/multi AZ
• I/O requests
• Data in free / out charged

Question 11

What is Cloudfront pricing?`

Answer 11

• Varies by region
• Data out
• no. requests

Question 12

What are AWS Networking costs?

Answer 12

• Private IP cheaper than public

- One AZ cheaper than multiple

Question 13

What tools are there for Billing and Costing (Estimating, Tracking, Monitoring)?

Answer 13

• Estimating
• TCO calculator
• Simple Pricing Calculator
• Cost Tracking
• Dashboard
• Cost Allocation Tags
• Cost and Usage Reports
• Cost Explorer: 3 month forecast
• Monitoring
• Billing alarms
• Budgets - setting / monitoring budget

Question 14

What are TCO and Pricing calculator?

Answer 14

• On-premise vs AWS pricing estimate for executive decision

- Pricing Calculator: Estimate the cost of your architecture

Question 15

Wat are Cost Allocation Tags?

Answer 15

• Track costs at detailed level
• AWS Tags : start with AWS and auto applied to resources
• User-Defined: applied by user, starts with user
• Used for organizing resources
• Can be used to define Resource Groups (***), which make it easier to manage and automate tasks on resources

Question 16

What are Cost and Usage Reports?

Answer 16

• Very detailed usage reports

Question 17

What is Cost Explorer?

Answer 17

• See costs over time
• Choose optimal savings plan
• Forecast usage up to 3 months out

Question 18

• What are Billing Alarms

Answer 18

• ‘Simple’ actual cost alarms (uses CloudWatch)

- not for budgeting alarms

Question 19

What are AWS Budgets?

Answer 19

• Create a budget and send alarms when costs exceed or forecast to exceed budget
• Budgets are usage, cost, reservation
• SNS notifications

Question 20

What is Trusted Advisor?

Answer 20

• Analyzed AWS accounts and provides recommendations

- Cost Optimization, Performance, Security, Fault Tolerance, Service Limits

Question 21

What are Trusted Advisor Levels ?

Answer 21

• Free: Core checks
• Full : (business and enterprise support): set CloudWatch alarms, Programmatic access using support API
• Checks EC2 instances over past 14 days for low usage

Question 22

What is AWS Basic Support:

Answer 22

• documentation, forums access
• Trusted advisor free level
• Personal Health Dashboard: personalized view of dashboard and alerts when our resources affected

Question 23

What is AWS Developer Support ?

Answer 23

• basic support
• 1 business hours email access
• General guidance < 24 hrs, system impaired < 12 hrs

Question 24

What is AWS Business Support?

Answer 24

• for production workloads
• Trusted advisor full
• 24X7 phone/email/chat
• Infrastructure event management ADDITIONAL FEE
• Interoperability and configuration guidance and troubleshooting (Enterprise too)
• production impaired < 4 hrs
• production down < 1 hr

Question 25

What is AWS Enterprise Support?

Answer 25

• Technical Acct Mngr
• Concierge support Team
• Online training and labs
• Infrastructure event management
• Well architected review
• Interoperability and configuration guidance and troubleshooting (Business too)
• Business critical system down < 15 minutes

Question 26

What is Savings Plan ? (NEW)

Answer 26

• Compute Savings Plan and EC2 Savings Plan
• Commit to a certain compute power ( $ amount per hour) for 1 or 3 years
• EC2 savings plan - based on usage for instance Family in a Region (ex C5 or M5)
• Setup in Cost Explorer
• Compute Savings Plan: regardless of family, region, size..
  
  • Compute options EC2, Fargate, Lambda

Question 27

What is Control Tower?

Answer 27

• Control Tower is an AWS native service providing a pre-defined set of blueprints and guardrails to help customers implement a landing zone for new AWS accounts