Acct Mgmt, Billing, Support Flashcards
AWS Organizations
- Global service
- Allows to manage multiple AWS accounts
- The main account is the master account
- Cost Benefits:
- Consolidated Billing across all accounts - single payment method
- Pricing benefits from aggregated usage (volume discount for EC2, S3…)
- Pooling of Reserved EC2 instances for optimal savings
- API is available to automate AWS account creation
- Restrict account privileges using Service Control Policies (SCP)
Multi Account Strategies
- Create accounts per department, per cost center, per dev / test /
prod, based on regulatory restrictions (using SCP), for better
resource isolation (ex: VPC), to have separate per-account
service limits, isolated account for logging - Multi Account vs One Account Multi VPC
- Use tagging standards for billing purposes
- Enable CloudTrail on all accounts, send logs to central S3 account
- Send CloudWatch Logs to central logging account
SCP
Service Control Policies
Whitelist or blacklist IAM actions
* Applied at the OU or Account level
* Does not apply to the Master Account
* SCP is applied to all the Users and Roles of the Account, including Root user
* The SCP does not affect service-linked roles
* Service-linked roles enable other AWS services to integrate with AWS Organizations
and can’t be restricted by SCPs.
* SCP must have an explicit Allow (does not allow anything by default)
* Use cases:
* Restrict access to certain services (for example: can’t use EMR)
* Enforce PCI compliance by explicitly disabling services
AWS Organization – Consolidated Billing
- When enabled, provides you with:
- Combined Usage – combine the usage across all AWS accounts in the AWS Organization to
share the volume pricing, Reserved Instances and Savings Plans discounts - One Bill – get one bill for all AWS Accounts in the AWS Organization
- The management account can turn off Reserved Instances discount sharing for any
account in the AWS Organization, including itself
AWS Control Tower
- Easy way to set up and govern a secure and compliant multi-account
AWS environment based on best practices - Benefits:
- Automate the set up of your environment in a few clicks
- Automate ongoing policy management using guardrails
- Detect policy violations and remediate them
- Monitor compliance through an interactive dashboard
- AWS Control Tower runs on top of AWS Organizations:
- It automatically sets up AWS Organizations to organize accounts and implement
SCPs (Service Control Policies)
AWS RAM
AWS Resource Access Manager
Share AWS resources that
you own with other AWS
accounts
* Share with any account or
within your Organization
* Avoid resource duplication!
* Supported resources include
Aurora, VPC Subnets, Transit
Gateway, Route 53, EC2
Dedicated Hosts, License
Manager Configurations…
Pricing Models in AWS
- AWS has 4 pricing models:
- Pay as you go: pay for what you use, remain agile, responsive, meet scale
demands - Save when you reserve: minimize risks, predictably manage budgets,
comply with long-terms requirements - Reservations are available for EC2 Reserved Instances, DynamoDB Reserved
Capacity, ElastiCache Reserved Nodes, RDS Reserved Instance, Redshift Reserved
Nodes - Pay less by using more: volume-based discounts
- Pay less as AWS grows
Compute Pricing
– EC2
On-demand instances:
* Minimum of 60s * Pay per second (Linux/Windows) or per hour (other)
- Reserved instances:
- Up to 75% discount compared to On-demand on hourly rate
*1 or 3 years commitment - All upfront, partial upfront, no upfront
- Spot instances:
- Up to 90% discount compared to On-demand on hourly rate
- Bid for unused capacity
- Dedicated Host:
- On-demand
- Reservation for 1 year or 3 years commitment
Savings plans as an alternative to save on sustained usage
Compute Pricing
– Lambda & ECS
Lambda:
* Pay per call * Pay per duration
ECS: * EC2 Launch Type Model: No additional fees, you pay for
AWS resources stored and created in your application
Fargate
* Fargate Launch Type Model: Pay for vCPU and memory
resources allocated to your applications in your containers
Storage Pricing – S3
- Storage class: S3 Standard, S3 Infrequent Access, S3 One-Zone IA, S3
Intelligent Tiering, S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive - Number and size of objects: Price can be tiered (based on volume)
- Number and type of requests
- Data transfer OUT of the S3 region
- S3 Transfer Acceleration
- Lifecycle transitions
- Similar service: EFS (pay per use, has infrequent access & lifecycle rules)
Storage Pricing
- EBS
- Volume type (based on performance) * Storage volume in GB per month provisionned * IOPS: * General Purpose SSD: Included * Provisioned IOPS SSD: Provisionned amount in IOPS * Magnetic: Number of requests * Snapshots: * Added data cost per GB per month * Data transfer: * Outbound data transfer are tiered for volume discounts * Inbound is free
Database Pricing - RDS
Per hour billing
* Database characteristics:
* Engine
* Size
* Memory class
* Purchase type:
* On-demand
* Reserved instances (1 or 3 years) with required up-front
* Backup Storage: There is no additional charge for backup storage up to
100% of your total database storage for a region.
* Additional storage (per GB per month) * Number of input and output requests per month * Deployment type (storage and I/O are variable): * Single AZ * Multiple AZs * Data transfer: * Outbound data transfer are tiered for volume discounts * Inbound is free
Pricing – CloudFront
- Pricing is different across different geographic regions * Aggregated for each edge location, then applied to your bill * Data Transfer Out (volume discount) * Number of HTTP/HTTPS requests
Savings Plan
Commit a certain $ amount per hour for 1 or 3 years * Easiest way to setup long-term commitments on AWS * EC2 Savings Plan * Up to 72% discount compared to On-Demand * Commit to usage of individual instance families in a region (e.g. C5 or M5) * Regardless of AZ, size (m5.xl to m5.4xl), OS (Linux/Windows) or tenancy * All upfront, partial upfront, no upfront * Compute Savings Plan * Up to 66% discount compared to On-Demand * Regardless of Family, Region, size, OS, tenancy, compute options * Compute Options: EC2, Fargate, Lambda * Machine Learning Savings Plan: SageMaker… * Setup from the AWS Cost Explorer console
AWS Compute Optimizer
Reduce costs and improve performance by recommending optimal AWS resources for your
workloads
* Helps you choose optimal configurations and right
- size your workloads (over/under provisioned)
* Uses Machine Learning to analyze your resources’
configurations and their utilization CloudWatch
metrics
* Supported resources * EC2 instances * EC2 Auto Scaling Groups * EBS volumes * Lambda functions * Lower your costs by up to 25% * Recommendations can be exported to S3
Billing and Costing Tools
- Estimating costs in the cloud: * Pricing Calculator
Tracking costs in the cloud: * Billing Dashboard * Cost Allocation Tags * Cost and Usage Reports * Cost Explorer
Monitoring against costs plans: * Billing Alarms * Budgets
AWS Pricing Calculator
Estimate the cost for your solution architecture
Cost Allocation Tags
Use cost allocation tags to track your AWS costs on a detailed level
* AWS generated tags
* Automatically applied to the resource you create
* Starts with Prefix aws: (e.g. aws: createdBy)
* User-defined tags
* Defined by the user
* Starts with Prefix user:
Cost Explorer
Visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time
* Create custom reports that analyze cost and usage data.
* Analyze your data at a high level: total costs and usage across all accounts
* Or Monthly, hourly, resource level granularity
* Choose an optimal Savings Plan (to lower prices on your bill)
* Forecast usage up to 12 months based on previous usage
Billing Alarms
in CloudWatch * Billing data metric is stored
in CloudWatch us-east1
* Billing data are for overall
worldwide AWS costs
* It’s for actual cost, not for
projected costs
* Intended a simple alarm (not
as powerful as AWS
Budgets)
AWS Budgets
- Create budget and send alarms when costs exceeds the budget
- 4 types of budgets: Usage, Cost, Reservation, Savings Plans
- For Reserved Instances (RI)
- Track utilization
- Supports EC2, ElastiCache, RDS, Redshift
- Up to 5 SNS notifications per budget
- Can filter by: Service, Linked Account, Tag, Purchase Option, Instance
Type, Region, Availability Zone, API Operation, etc… - Same options as AWS Cost Explorer!
- 2 budgets are free, then $0.02/day/budget
AWS Cost Anomaly Detection
- Continuously monitor your cost and usage using ML to detect unusual spends
- It learns your unique, historic spend patterns to detect one-time cost spike and/or
continuous cost increases (you don’t need to define thresholds) - Monitor AWS services, member accounts, cost allocation tags, or cost categories
- Sends you the anomaly detection report with root-cause analysis
- Get notified with individual alerts or daily/weekly summary (using SNS)
AWS Service Quotas
- Notify you when you’re close to a service quota value threshold
- Create CloudWatch Alarms on the Service Quotas console
- Example: Lambda concurrent executions
- Request a quota increase from AWS Service Quotas or shutdown resources before limit is reached
Trusted Advisor
No need to install anything
– high level AWS account assessment
* Analyze your AWS accounts and provides
recommendation on 6 categories: * Cost optimization * Performance * Security * Fault tolerance * Service limits * Operational Excellence
* Business & Enterprise Support plan * Full Set of Checks * Programmatic Access using AWS Support API
