AWS Billing & Pricing Flashcards
3 Fundamentals of AWS Pricing
Compute - paying for amount of time your compute instance is running
Storage - paying for amount of data your storing
Out-bound Data Transfer - paying for data going out of AWS, but not going in AWS
Pricing Model:
On-demand
used for compute and database capacity
no long-term commitments or upfront payments
Pricing Model:
Dedicated Instances
available for Amazon EC2
hardware is dedicated to a single customer
Pricing Model:
Spot Instances
purchase spare capacity with no commitments
great discounts from hourly rates
Pricing Model:
Reservations
up to 75% discount in exchange for a term commitment
Options for 1 or 3 year terms
Options to Pay: No upfront, partial upfront, all upfront
Available for services: EC2 Reserved Instances; DynamoDB Reserved Capacity; ElastiCache Reserved Nodes; Relational Database Service (RDS) Reserved Instances; RedShift Reserved Nodes
Free Stuff
- Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
- Elastic Beanstalk (but not the resources created)
- CloudFormation (but not the resources created)
- Identity Access Management (IAM)
- Auto Scaling (but not the resources created)
- Consolidated Billing
Compute Pricing Model:
Amazon EC2 On-demand
you pay for compute or database capacity with no long-term commitments or upfront payments
recommended for user who prefer low cost and flexibility w/o upfront payment or long-term commitments
good for applications with short-term, spiky, or unpredictable workloads that cannot be interrupted
you pay for compute capacity per hour or per second (per second is linux only) and applies to On-Demand, Reserved and Spot instances)
Compute Pricing Model:
Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances
provide significant discounts, up to 75% off compared to On-Demand pricing, by paying for capacity ahead of time
provide a capacity reservation when applied to a specific Availability Zone
Good for applications that have predictable usage, that need reserved capacity, and for customers who can commit to a 1 or 3-year term
Compute Pricing Model:
Amazon EC2 Spot Instances
purchase spare computing capacity with no upfront commitment at discounted hourly rates
provides up to 90% off the On-Demand price
recommended for applications that have flexible start/end times, applications that are only feasible at very low compute prices, and users with urgent computing needs for a lot of additional capacity
in the old model spot instances were terminated because of higher competing bids, in the new model this does not happen but instances still may be terminated (with a 2 minute warning) when EC2 needs the capacity back - note: the exam may not be updated to reflect this yet
Compute Pricing Model:
Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts
EC2 server dedicated to a single server
runs in your VPC
good for when you want to leverage existing server-bound software licenses such as Windows Server, SQL, Server, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
also good for meeting compliance requirements
you pay per host, unlike Dedicated Instances, where you pay per instance
Compute Pricing Model:
Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances
Amazon EC2 instances that run in a VPC on hardware that’s dedicated to a single customer
physically isolated at the host hardware level from instances that belong to other AWS accounts
may share hardware w/ other instances from the same AWS account that are not dedicated instances
Compute Pricing Model:
AWS Lambda Pricing
Requests - 1M requests free; $0.20 per 1M requests thereafter
Duration: 400,000 GS-seconds per month free; $0.0000167 GS-second used thereafter
pay only for what you use
charged based on the number of requests for functions and the time it takes to execute the code
price is dependent on the amount of memory allocated to the function
Compute Pricing Model:
Amazon ECS Pricing
with EC2 launch type you pay for the compute instances in your cluster
with Fargate launch type you pay for the vCPU and memory resources that your containerized application requests
Types of Reserved Instance:
Standard
some attributes, such as instance size, can be modified during the term
instance family cannot be modified
you cannot exchange a Standard Reserved Instance, only modify it
Can be sold in the Reserved Instance Marketplace
Types of Reserved Instance:
Convertible
can be exchanged during the term for another Convertible Reserved Instance with new attributed including instance family, instance type, platform, scope, or tenancy
cannot be sold in the Reserved Instance Marketplace
Types of Reserved Instance:
Scheduled
Enable you to purchase capacity reservations that recur on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, with a specified start time and duration, for a one-year term
you reserved the capacity in advance, so that you know it is available when you need it
you pay for the time that the instances or scheduled, even if you do not use them
Savings Plans
flexible pricing model that offer low prices on EC2, Lambda, and Fargate usage
Commit to a consistent amount of usage (measured in $/hr) for 1 or 3 year term
Compute Savings Plan:
provides the most flexibility and helps to reduce costs by up to 66%
Apply to EC2 instance usage regardless of instance family, size, AZ, region, OS or tenancy, and also apply to Fargate or Lambda usage
EC2 Instance Savings Plans:
Provide the lowest prices, with savings up to 72%
commit to usage of individual instance families in a region
can change your usage between instances within a family in that region
Storage Pricing:
Amazon S3
storage - pricing per class, eg Standard or IA
storage quantity - data volume stored in your buckets on a per GB basis
number of requests - the number and type of requests, eg GET, PUT, POST, LIST, COPY
lifecycle transitions requests - moving data between storage classes
data transfer - data transferred out of an S3 region is charged
transfer acceleration
storage management pricing for some additional features
Storage Pricing:
Amazon S3 Glacier
extremely low cost and you pay only for what you need with no commitments of upfront fees
charged for requests and data transferred out of Glacier
“Amazon Glacier Select” pricing allows queries to run directly on data stored on Glacier w/o having to retrieve the archive. Priced on amount of data scanned, returned, and number of requests initiated
3 options for access to archives:
Expedited - 1-5 min
Standard - 3-5 hours
Bulk - 5-12 hours
Storage Pricing:
Elastic Block Storage (EBS)
volumes - volume storage for all EBS volumes type is charged by the amount of GB provisioned (not used) per month
Snapshots - based on the 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
Storage Pricing:
Elastic File System (EFS)
Storage classes (2)
- standard
- infrequent access storage (EFS IA), which is cheaper
pay for the amount of storage you use
lower cost of EFS IA
EFS Provisioned throughput
Networking Pricing:
Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
VPC itself is free, however what is chargeable are: AWS Site-Site VPN connection; AWS PrivateLink; Amazon VPC Traffic Mirroring; NAT Gateways
Networking Pricing:
AWS Direct Connect
pay for port hours
outbound data transfer (1 Gig or 10 Gig)
Database Pricing:
Amazon RDS
runs on EC2 instances
clock hours of server uptime - amount of time the DB instance is running
Database engine, instance size and memory
Database purchase type - eg On-Demand, Reserved
Provisioned storage - backup is included up to 100% of the size of the DB (database)
Requests - the number of input and output requests to the DB
Deployment type - single AZ or multi-AZ
Data transfer - inbound is free, outbound data transfer costs are tiered
Database Pricing:
Amazon DynamoDB
provisioned throughput (write) provisioned throughput (read) indexed data storage
on-demand capacity mode:
- pay for the data reads and writes your application makes on the tables
- no need to specify read and write throughput
Provisioned capacity mode:
- specify the number of reads and writes per second you expect your application to require
- can use the auto scaling to automatically adjust
Data transfer
global tables
Content Delivery & DNS Services Pricing:
CloudFront
traffic distribution - data transfer and request pricing, varies across regions, and is based on the edge location from which the content is served
Requests - the number and type of requests (HTTP or HTTPS) and the geographic region in which they are made
Data transfer out - quantity of data transferred out of CloudFront edge locations
there are additional chargeable items such as invalidation requests, field-level encryption requests, and custom SSL certificates
Content Delivery & DNS Services Pricing:
Amazon Route 53
monthly charges for managing hosted zones
DNS queries
Domain names
Estimate Pricing:
AWS Cost Explorer
free tool that allows 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 3 months
can be used to discover patterns in how much you spend on AWS resources over time and to identify cost problem areas
helps 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
Estimate Pricing:
AWS Simple Monthly Calculator
estimate monthly AWS bill more efficiently
you can add services in different regions
calculator includes support for most AWS services and you can include additional costs such as data ingress/egress charges, data storage charges, and retrieval fees
it is possible to select EC2 dedicated hosts and reserved instances with various pricing models
support an also be added
Estimate Pricing:
AWS Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator
free tool provided by AWS that allows you to estimate the cost savings of using the AWS Cloud vs. using an on-premise data center
helps you reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by avoiding large capital expenditures on hardware and infrastructure
provide directional guidance on cost savings
works by you inputting cost elements of your current/or estimated on-premises data center, and comparing those cost requirements with how much it would cost on AWS
elements can be added/modified as you move through the process to best estimate the cost savings
What else is included in a TCO calculation? (Exam q)
Rack infrastructure costs
Virtualization software costs
Facilities costs (data center space, power, and cooling)
Networking costs
Data transfer costs
IT Labor costs - some labor costs are also required on AWS
Estimate Pricing:
AWS Pricing Calculator (New tool)
very simple to use create an estimate search for your service quick option or advanced option will be replacing simple monthly calculator
AWS Support Plans:
Basic
billing and account support only (access to forums only)
everyone gets this
no technical support offered
AWS Support Plans:
Developer
Recommended if you are experimenting or testing in AWS.
business hours support via email
Developer allows one person to open unlimited cases
AWS Support Plans:
Business
Recommended if you have production workloads in AWS.
The Business support plan provides < 1 hour response times for a production system failure or impairment
24x7 email, chat, and phone support; unlimited contacts to open unlimited cases
AWS Support Plans:
Enterprise
Recommended if you have business and/or mission critical workloads in AWS.
provides <15 min response time for a business critical system down
Enterprise support comes with a Technical Account Manager (TAM) (Exam q)
24x7 email, chat, and phone support; unlimited contacts to open unlimited cases
AWS Organizations
allows you to consolidate multiple AWS accounts into an organization that you create and centrally manage
Available in 2 feature sets:
- Consolidated Billing
- All features
includes root accounts and organizational units
policies are applied to root accounts or OUs
Consolidated Billing
includes:
Paying Account - independent and cannot access resources of other accounts
Linked Accounts - all linked accounts are independent
Benefits:
- One bill - you get one bill for multiple accounts
- easy tracking - you can track the charges across multiple accounts adn 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. Can result in a lower charge for you project, department, or company than with individual standalone accounts
- No extra fee - Consolidated billing is offered at no additional cost
Tagging
Tags are key/value pairs that can be attached to AWS resources
Tags contain metadata (data about data)
tags can be sometimes be inherited - eg resources created by Auto Scaling, CloudFormation or Elastic Beanstalk
Resource Groups
Resource groups make it easy to group resources using the tags that are assigned to them. You can group resources that share one or more tags
Resource groups contain general information, such as: region, name, health checks
Also specific information, such as: public & private IP addresses (for EC2); port configurations (for ELB); database engine (for RDS)
Cost Allocation Tags
Track your AWS costs on a detailed level
must be enabled manually through billing & reporting console
AWS uses the cost allocation tags to organize your resource costs on your cost allocation report
Technical Account Manager (TAM)
proactively monitor your environment and assist with optimization and coordinate access to programs and AWS experts
only included in Enterprise plan
Infrastructure Event Management (IEM)
offers architecture and scaling guidance and operational support during the preparation and execution of planned events, such as shopping holidays, product launches, and migrations.
For these events, it will help you assess operational readiness, identify and mitigate risks, and execute your event confidently with AWS experts by your side
Business plan - can access w/ additional fee
Enterprise - comes with this plan
AWS Support Concierge Service
assist customers with billing and pricing inquiries
