Amazon EC2 | Billing Flashcards
How is this service different than a plain hosting service?
Billing
Amazon EC2 | Compute
Traditional hosting services generally provide a pre-configured resource for a fixed amount of time and at a predetermined cost. Amazon EC2 differs fundamentally in the flexibility, control and significant cost savings it offers developers, allowing them to treat Amazon EC2 as their own personal data center with the benefit of Amazon.com’s robust infrastructure.
When computing requirements unexpectedly change (up or down), Amazon EC2 can instantly respond, meaning that developers have the ability to control how many resources are in use at any given point in time. In contrast, traditional hosting services generally provide a fixed number of resources for a fixed amount of time, meaning that users have a limited ability to easily respond when their usage is rapidly changing, unpredictable, or is known to experience large peaks at various intervals.
Secondly, many hosting services don’t provide full control over the compute resources being provided. Using Amazon EC2, developers can choose not only to initiate or shut down instances at any time, they can completely customize the configuration of their instances to suit their needs – and change it at any time. Most hosting services cater more towards groups of users with similar system requirements, and so offer limited ability to change these.
Finally, with Amazon EC2 developers enjoy the benefit of paying only for their actual resource consumption – and at very low rates. Most hosting services require users to pay a fixed, up-front fee irrespective of their actual computing power used, and so users risk overbuying resources to compensate for the inability to quickly scale up resources within a short time frame.
How will I be charged and billed for my use of Amazon EC2?
Billing
Amazon EC2 | Compute
You pay only for what you use. Displayed pricing is an hourly rate but depending on which instances you choose, you pay by the hour or second (minimum of 60 seconds) for each instance type. Partial instance-hours consumed are billed based on instance usage. Data transferred between AWS services in different regions will be charged as Internet Data Transfer on both sides of the transfer. Usage for other Amazon Web Services is billed separately from Amazon EC2.
For EC2 pricing information, please visit the pricing section on the EC2 detail page.
When does billing of my Amazon EC2 systems begin and end?
Billing
Amazon EC2 | Compute
Billing commences when Amazon EC2 initiates the boot sequence of an AMI instance. Billing ends when the instance terminates, which could occur through a web services command, by running “shutdown -h”, or through instance failure. When you stop an instance, we shut it down but don’t charge hourly usage for a stopped instance, or data transfer fees, but we do charge for the storage for any Amazon EBS volumes. To learn more, visit the AWS Documentation.
What defines billable EC2 instance usage?
Billing
Amazon EC2 | Compute
Instance usages are billed for any time your instances are in a “running” state. If you no longer wish to be charged for your instance, you must “stop” or “terminate” the instance to avoid being billed for additional instance usage. Billing starts when an instance transitions into the running state.
If I have two instances in different availability zones, how will I be charged for regional data transfer?
Billing
Amazon EC2 | Compute
Each instance is charged for its data in and data out at corresponding Data Transfer rates. Therefore, if data is transferred between these two instances, it is charged at “Data Transfer Out from EC2 to Another AWS Region” for the first instance and at “Data Transfer In from Another AWS Region” for the second instance. Please refer to this page for detailed data transfer
If I have two instances in different regions, how will I be charged for data transfer?
Billing
Amazon EC2 | Compute
Each instance is charged for its data in and data out at Internet Data Transfer rates. Therefore, if data is transferred between these two instances, it is charged at Internet Data Transfer Out for the first instance and at Internet Data Transfer In for the second instance.
How will my monthly bill show per-second versus per-hour?
Billing
Amazon EC2 | Compute
Although EC2 charges in your monthly bill will now be calculated based on a per second basis, for consistency, the monthly EC2 bill will show cumulative usage for each instance that ran in a given month in decimal hours. An example would be an instance running for 1 hour 10 minutes and 4 seconds would look like 1.1677. Below is an example of a detailed billing report. The two highlighted areas show how the new report will look based on decimal hours.
