Accounts, Billing, and Support Flashcards
Which of the following is not one of the three AWS Pricing Fundamentals:
Storage
Compute
Inbound Data Transfer
Outbound Data Transfer
Inbound Data Transfer
AWS Pricing Fundamentals:
- Compute - amount of resources (CPU, RAM) and duration of use
- Storage - quantity of data stored (allocated)
- —>S3 = amount of data you uploaded
- —>EBS = the size of the volume you create - Outbound Data Transfer - quantity of date going outbound from services
Pricing Models:
Pay-as you go
Save when you reserve
Pay less by using more
Pay-as-you-go:
- -Easily adapt to changing business needs, not forecasts
- -Right-sizing
- -Improved responsiveness to change
- -Reduce risk over over-positioning of missing capacity
Save when you reserve:
- -You reserve capacity for a reduced rate (eg. RDS and EC2)
- -Save up to 75% compared to on-demand (pay-as-you-go) rates
- -The more you pay upfront the greater the discount
Pay less by using more:
- -Pay less using volume-based discounts
- -Tiered pricing means the more you use the lower the unit pricing
- Ex. Unit price (per GB of storage) could be lower is you are using more
EC2 Pricing Options:
On-Demand Reserved Scheduled Reserved Instances Spot Instances Dedicated Instances Dedicated Hosts Savings Plans
Covered in more detail on separate flashcards
EC2 On-Demand Pricing:
EC2 On-Demand Pricing:
- Standard rate - no discount
- No commitments
- Not intended for long running workloads b/c most expensive option
Best for:
- ->Dev/test
- ->Short-term, or unpredictable workloads
- ->Small projects
EC2 Reserved Pricing:
EC2 Reserved Pricing
- 1 OR 3 year commitment
- Up to 75% discount
Best for:
- ->Steady-state, predictable workloads
- —->Ex. Line of Business applications that are predictable and run year after year so need to secure the best pricing model
- ->Reserved capacity w/ reserved instances
EC2 Scheduled Reserved Instances Pricing:
EC2 Scheduled Reserved Instances Pricing
- Match capacity reservation to recurring schedule
- Minimum 1200 hours per year
-Ex: Reporting application that runs 6 hours a day/4 days a week = 1248 hours per year
So, you reserve 1248 hours per year and get a reserved discount
You can ONLY use the service during the agreed upon times
AWS is phasing out this option
EC2 Spot Instances Pricing:
EC2 Spot Instances Pricing
- You bid for unused capacity
- 90% discount
- Negative - Instances can be terminated at any time and you get very little notice
- —>2 minute warning if AWS needs to reclaim capacity
- —>warning is available via instance metadata and CloudWatch Events
Positive - Very cost effective solution to run a large processing workload
Spot Block
- You can run EC2 instances uninterrupted for 1 - 6 hours
- Specify the block duration, number of instances and your bid price
- Pricing is 30% - 45% less than On-Demand (not as big of a discount as Spot but if you need uninterrupted timeframe this is better option)
BEST FOR:
- Workloads w/ flexible start and end times
- Data is saved elsewhere and application logic is able to recover from any terminated instances
Spot Instance
VS
Spot Fleet
VS
EC2 FleetSpot Instance
-One or more EC2 instances
Spot Fleet
-AWS launches and maintains the number of Spot/On-Demand instances to meet specified target capacity
EC2 Fleet
- AWS launches and maintains a specified number of Spot/On-Demand/Reserved instances in a single API call
- Can define separate On Demand/Spot capacity targets, bids, instance types, and AZs
EC2 Dedicated Instances Pricing:
EC2 Dedicated Instances Pricing
-Physical isolation at the Host Hardware level from instances belonging to other AWS customers
—->(as opposed to sharing the infrastructure on which AWS is run with other customers)
—->Dedicated Instances can share hardware w/ other instances from YOUR account but not from other AWS customers
- Pay per INSTANCE
- Expensive
EC2 Dedicated Hosts Pricing:
EC2 Dedicated Hosts Pricing
- Physical Server dedicated for your use
- Pay per HOST
- Can add capacity using an allocation request
- MOST Expensive of the options
BEST FOR:
- Workloads w/ server-bound software licenses
- —>Some licensing is bound to CPUs in physical Host where you instance is run
- —>Visibility of sockets for licensing, cores, host ID - Host affinity
- —>Control which Host a particular instance is running on
- —>May want to make sure 2 instances are running on diff hosts (targeted instance placement)
EC2 Savings Plans Pricing:
EC2 Savings Plans Pricing
- Hourly commitment to a consistent amount of usage
- 1 OR 3 yr commitment
- COMPUTE Savings Plan
- —>Hourly commitment to usage of EC2, Fargate and Lamda
- —>Usage in any Region or family
- —>Any size, tenancy, and OS - EC2 Savings Plan
- —>Hourly commitment to usage of EC2 ONLY
- —>Usage for Ec2 only w/in a selected Region and Instance Family
- —>Any size, tenancy, and OS
Amazon EC2 Billing:
Amazon EC2 Billing
- Billed per second; minimum of 1 minute
- —>Amazon Linux and Ubuntu in On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot Forms
- —>EBS Volumes attached to EC2 instances are also billed per second; minimum of 1 minute
Billed per hour; minimum of 1 hour
- —>Windows
- —>Commercial Linux distributions ie:
- ——->Red Hat Enterprise Linux (EL)
- ——->SUSE Enterprise Server (ES)
Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances (RIs) Billing:
Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances (RIs)
Payment can be:
- ->All Upfront - BEST discount but you have to pay full amount up front (not great for your cash flow)
- ->Partial Upfront - Partial fee upfront and then a monthly payment
- ->No Upfront - No partial fee upfront, just monthly payment (better for your cash flow)
Two Types of Reserved Instances: 1. Standard RI -->Can change: ---->Availability Zone ---->Instance size (if Linux) ---->Networking type USE MODIFY_ RESERVED_INSTANCES API action to perform changes
- Convertible RI
–>Can change:
—->Same as Standard PLUS:
—->Family
—->Operating System (OS)
—->Tenancy
USE EXCHANGE_RESERVED_INSTANCES API action to perform changes
When the attributes of an instance you launched in your account match the attributes of a reserved instance that is when any discounts are applied
Attributes include:
–>Type of instance you are running
–>Operating System you are running it on
–>Availability Zone
–>Region
–>Tenancy:
—->Default
—->Dedicated - running on dedicated hardware
When an Availability Zone is specified you can reserve capacity in that AZ
- —>CANNOT reserve capacity in Region
- —>RI discount applies to all Availability Zones but not Regions
Amazon S3 Pricing:
Amazon S3 Pricing
Charged for:
- Storage class that you are using
- —>e.g. Standard or IA
- Storage Quantity
- —>data volume stored in your buckets on a per GB basis
- Number of Requests
- —>number and type of requests
Lifecycle transitions requests
—->requests to move data between storage classes
- Data transfer
- —>data transfer out of an S3 region is charged
Amazon S3 Glacier Pricing:
Amazon S3 Glacier Pricing
Three options for access to archives:
- Expedited - 1-5 minutes data access time (not available for Glacier Deep Archive)
- Standard - 3-5 hours data access time
- Bulk - 5-12 hours data access time
Amazon EBS Pricing:
Amazon EBS Pricing
Charged for:
- Volumes
- —>volume storage for all EBS volumes types
- —>charged by the amount of GB provisioned per month
- —>Paying for space used BY the volume, not the amount of space used within a volume
- —>Ex. If you have 100GB volume and are only using 5GB you are still paying for the full 100GB
- Snapshots
- —>Amount of space consumed by snapshots in S3
- —>Copying snapshots is charged on the amount of data copied across regions
- Data transfer
- —>Inbound data transfer is free
- —>Outbound data transfer charges are tiered
Amazon RDS Pricing:
Amazon RDS Pricing
Charged for:
- Clock hours of server uptime
- —>Instance type you choose and the time that the DB instance it is actually running
- Database characteristics
- —>e.g. database engine, size, and memory class
- Database purchase type
- —>e.g. On-Demand, Reserved
-Number of database instances
- Provisioned storage
- —>Since you are provisioning EBS volumes the cost is based on what was provisioned NOT what was actually consumed
- —>Backup is included up to 100% of the size of the DB
Additional storage
—->The amount of storage in addition to the provisioned storage is charged per GB per month
- Requests
- —>The number of input and output requests to the DB
- Deployment type
- —>Single or multi-AZ
Reserved instances
- —>RDS Reserved Instances (RI) can be purchased
- —–>Available for:
- ——->Aurora
- ——->MySQL
- ——->MariaDB
- ——->Oracle
- ——->SQL Server
Amazon Dynamo DB Pricing:
Amazon Dynamo DB Pricing
Charged for - Reading, writing, and storing data
ON-DEMAND Capacity mode:
- —>Charged for reads and writes
- —>No need to specify how much capacity is required
- —>Good for unpredictable workloads
PROVISIONED capacity mode:
- —>Specify number of reads and writes
- —>Can use Auto Scaling
- —>Good for predictable workloads
- —>Consistent traffic or gradual changes
AWS CloudFront Pricing:
AWS CloudFront Pricing
Charged for:
- Traffic distribution
- —>Data transfer and request pricing
- —>Varies across regions
- —>Based on the edge location from which the content is served
- Requests
- —>Number and type of requests (HTTP or HTTPS)
- —>Geographic region in which they are made
Data transfer out
- —>Quantity of data transferred out of the CloudFront edge locations
- —>Invalidation requests, field-level encryption requests, and custom SSL certificates
AWS Lamda Pricing:
Charged for:
- Number of requests
- Duration of request - rounded up to the nearest millisecond
- Price is dependent on the amount of memory allocated to the function
Which AWS Support Plan provides 24X7 phone, email, and chat access to Cloud Support Engineers. Also provides Programmatic Case Management and Proactive Programs and Services for an add’l fee?
Business Support
Enterprise Support
Developer Support
Business Support
- AWS Trusted Advisor Best Practice Checks
- —>Full set of checks
- Enhanced Tech Support
- —>24X7 phone, email, and chat access to Cloud Support Engineers
- —>Unlimited cases/unlimited contacts (IAM supported)
- Case Severity/Response Times
- —>General guidance: <24 hours
- —>System impaired <12 hours
- —>Production system impaired <4 hours
- —>Production system down <1 hour
- Architectural Guidance
- —>Contextual to your use-cases
- Programmatic Case Management
- —>AWS Support API
Proactive Programs and Services
—->Access to Infrastructure Event Management for add’l fee
Which AWS Support Plan provides 24X7 phone, email, and chat access to Cloud Support Engineers. Also provides Programmatic Case Management, Proactive Programs and Services, Technical Account Management (TAM) and Account Assistance for free?
Business Support
Enterprise Support
Developer Support
Enterprise Support
- AWS Trusted Advisor Best Practice Checks
- —>Full set of checks
- Enhanced Tech Support
- —>24X7 phone, email, and chat access to Cloud Support Engineers
- —>Unlimited cases/unlimited contacts (IAM supported)
- Case Severity/Response Times
- —>General guidance: <24 hours
- –>System impaired <12 hours
- —>Production system impaired <4 hours
- —>Production system down <1 hour
- —>Business-critical system down <15 minutes
- Architectural Guidance
- —>Consultative review and guidance based on your applications
- Programmatic Case Management
- —>AWS Support API
- Proactive Programs and Services
- —>Infrastructure Event Management
- —>Well-Architected Reviews
- —>Access to proactive reviews, workshops, and deep dives
Technical Account Management
- —>Designated Technical Account Manager (TAM)
- —>proactively monitor your environment
- —>assist with optimization
- —>coordinate access to programs and AWS experts
Account Assistance
—->Concierge Support Team
Which AWS Support Plan provides email access to Cloud Support Associates but does not provide Programmatic Case Management or Proactive Programs and Services?
Business Support
Enterprise Support
Developer Support
Developer Support
- AWS Trusted Advisor Best Practice Checks
- —>7 core checks
Enhanced Tech Support
- —>Business hours email access to Cloud Support Associates
- —>Unlimited cases/1 primary contact
Case Severity/Response Times
- —>General guidance: <24 hours
- —>System impaired <12 hours
- Architectural Guidance
- —>General
AWS Organizations Consolidated Billing:
AWS Organizations
Consolidated billing has the following benefits:
- One bill
- —>you get one bill for multiple accounts
- Easy tracking
- —>you can track charges across multiple accounts and download the combined cost and usage data
- Combined usage
- —>you can combine the usage across all accounts in the organization to share the volume pricing discounts and Reserved Instance discounts
- No extra fee
- —>consolidated billing is offered at no additional cost
AWS Budgets
AWS Budgets
- Set custom budgets
- —>set custom usage and reservation budgets
- Configure alerts
- —>reserve alerts when you exceed or are forecast to exceed your alert thresholds
- Integrated with other AWS services
- —>Includes Cost Explorer, Chatbot, and Service Catalog
COST BUDGET
—->Monitor your costs against a specified amount and receive alert when your user-defined thresholds are met
USAGE BUDGET
—->Monitor your usage of one or more specified usage types or usage type groups and received alerts when your user-defined thresholds are met
RESERVATION BUDGET
- —>Track the RI Utilization or RI Coverage associated w/ your reservations
- —>Support Amazon EC2, RDS, Redshift, ElastiCache and Elastisearch reservation models
SAVINGS PLAN BUDGET
—–>Track the utilization and coverage associated with your Savings Plans
Cost Allocation Tags:
Cost Allocation Tags
- Way to use tagging to add some metadata to our resources and then use that data for billing purposes
- Tags can be activated as Cost Allocation Tags to attribute costs to certain resources
AWS Cost Explorer
AWS Cost Explorer
- Free tool that allows you to view charts of your costs
- —>You can view cost data for the past 13 months and forecast how much you are likely to spend over the next three months
-Cost Explorer can be used to discover patterns in how you spend on AWS resources over time and to identify problem areas
- Can help you identify service usage statistics such as:
- —>Which services you use the most
- —>View metrics for which AZ has the most traffic
- —>Which linked account is used the most
AWS Cost & Usage Report:
AWS Cost & Usage Report
- Publish AWS billing reports to Amazon S3 bucket
- Report will break down costs by: Hour, day month, product, product resource, tags
- Can update report up to 3X per day
- Create, retrieve, and delete your reports using the AWS CUR API Reference
AWS Price List API
AWS Price List API
-Query the prices of AWS services
- Price List Service API (Query API)
- —>Query w/ JSON
- AWS Price List API (Bulk API)
- —>Query with HTML
- —>Alerts via Amazon SNS when prices change
