Billing and Pricing

Question 1

What are the 3 fundamental drivers of cost?

Answer 1

1. Compute: Hourly from launch to termination, unless you made a reservation
2. Storage: The data you store in the cloud
3. Outbound data transfer: Data in flight moving between systems

Question 2

What are the free offer types of AWS?

Answer 2

1. 12 months free: 12 months’ free usage following your initial sign-up data to AWS
2. Always free: Offers do not expire and are available to AWS customers
3. Trials: Short-term free trials starting from the data you activate a particular service

Question 3

What are the 5 ways to pay for AWAS EC2 instances?

Answer 3

1. On-demand
2. Savings plan: Commit to compute usage for a 1- or 3-year term
3. Reserved instances
4. Spot instances: Only launch when spare capacity is available
5. Dedicate hosts

Question 4

How is Lambda pricing determined?

Answer 4

Based on # of requests, code execution time, always free 1 million requests per month

Question 5

What is S3’s pricing parameters?

Answer 5

a. Depends on the storage class (e.g., Glacier)
b. Storage: Number and size of objects
c. Data transfer: Data transferred out of S3 region
d. Request and data retrieval: Requests made for data and amount of requests

Question 6

What are Relational Database Service (RDS) features that drive pricing?

Answer 6

a. Running clock hours
b. Type of database
c. Storage
d. Purchase type (on demand, reserve DB)
e. Database count
f. API requests/calls
g. Deployment type (single AZ or multiple AZ)
h. Data transfer: Inbound is free, outbound has a charge

Question 7

What is an AWS Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)?

Answer 7

1. Financial estimate that helps you understand both the direct and indirect costs of AWS
2. There used to be a TCO calculated but it is no longer available.
3. AWS Application Discovery Services helps you plan projects to AWS and estimate TCO

Question 8

What is AWS Application Discovery Service?

Answer 8

Helps you plan projects to AWS and estimate TCO

Question 9

What are ways to reduce TCO using AWS?

Answer 9

a. Minimize capital expenditures
b. Utilize reserved instances
c. Right size your resources

Question 10

What is AWS Budgets?

Answer 10

a. Allows you to set customer budgets that alert you when your costs or usage exceed your budgeted amount
b. Improves planning and cost control
c. Budget types are Cost, Usage, and Reservation budgets

Question 11

What is AWS Cost and Usage Reports?

Answer 11

a. Contains the most comprehensive set of cost and usage data
b. Downloadable detailed and comprehensive report
c. Lists usage for each service category
d. Aggregate usage by daily, hourly, or monthly level

Question 12

What is AWS Cost Explorer?

Answer 12

a. Allows you to visualize and forecast your costs and usage over time
b. Visualize costs over time
c. View past 12 months
d. View up to 3 months forecast in the future

Question 13

What is AWS Organizations?

Answer 13

a. Allows you to centrally manage multiple AWS accounts under one umbrella
b. Group multiple accounts
c. Single payment for all accounts
d. Automate account creation
e. Allocation resources and apply policies across accounts

Question 14

What are AWS Organization Units (OU)?

Answer 14

Organization units (OU) are grouping of AWS accounts that are similar

Question 15

What are AWS Service Control Policies?

Answer 15

i. A type of organization policy that you can use to manage permissions in your organization
ii. SCP’s can be applied to an individual member account and an organization unit (OU)

Question 16

What is AWS Control Tower?

Answer 16

a. Helps you ensure your accounts conform to company-wide policies
b. Helps setup new accounts using a multi-account strategy
c. Works directly with AWS organizations
d. Enforces the best use of services across accounts
e. Provides a dashboard to manage accounts

Question 17

What is AWS Systems Manager?

Answer 17

a. Gives you visibility and control over your AWS resources
b. Automate operational tasks on your resources
c. Group resources and take action
d. Patch and run commands on multiple EC2 instances or manage RDS instances

Question 18

What is AWS Trusted Advisor?

Answer 18

a. Provides real-time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices
b. Checks your account and makes recommendations
c. Helps you see service limits
d. Helps understand best practices

Question 19

What are the 5 pillars resources are evaluated against in AWS Trusted Advisor?

Answer 19

i. Cost optimization
ii. Performance
iii. Security
iv. Fault tolerance
v. Service limits

Question 20

What is AWS Management Services?

Answer 20

a. Helps you efficiently operate your AWS infrastructure
b. Augments your internal staff
c. Provide ongoing management of your infrastructure
d. Reduces operational risks and overhead

Question 21

What is AWS Professional Services?

Answer 21

a. Helps enterprise customers move to a cloud-based operating model
b. Proposes solutions
c. Architect solutions
d. Implement solutions

Question 22

What is AWS Partner Network?

Answer 22

a. Global community of approved partners that offer software solutions and consulting services for AWS

Question 23

What is AWS Marketplace?

Answer 23

a. Digital catalog of prebuilt solutions you can purchase or license. You can buy 3rd part software, sell solutions to AWS customers, and search catalog of services

Question 24

What are the different kinds of AWS support plans?

Answer 24

1. Basic
2. Developer
3. Business
4. Enterprise

Question 25

What support do you get with Basic Support?

Answer 25

i. Gives access to account/billing and service limit increase
ii. Customer service access via 24/7 email only

Question 26

What support do you get with Developer Support and how much is it?

Answer 26

$29/month

ii. Service limit increase
iii. Technical support
iv. Allowed 1 primary contract during business hours via email only. Guaranteed response times for less than 24 hours for general guidance and less than 12 hours for system impaired instances
v. Open unlimited support cases

Question 27

What support do you get with Business Support and how much is it?

Answer 27

$100/month

i. Same as Developer Support
ii. Unlimited contact
iii. Full set of trusted advisor checks
iv. Cloud support engineers support 24/7 via email, phone, or chat
v. Production system down response time less than an hour

Question 28

What support do you get with Enterprise Support and how much is it?

Answer 28

$15,000/month

i. Same a Business Support plus a Technical Account Manager (TAM), concierge support team, infrastructure event management, and full set of trusted advisor checks

Question 29

What are the kinds of support cases?

Answer 29

1. Account and billing (free)
2. Service limit increases (free)
3. Technical support (premium)

Question 30

What are the 12 months free options?

Answer 30

1. EC2: 750 hours per month of Linux and Windows
2. S3: 5 GB of S3 standard storage, 20,000 Get requests and 2,000 Put requests
3. RDS: 750 hours of RDS
4. CloudFront: 50GB data transfer out and 2 million HTTP(s) requests per month

Question 31

What are the Always Free options?

Answer 31

1. DynamoDB: 200 million requests per month and 25GB of storage
2. S3 Glacier: Retrieve up to 10GB per month
3. Lambda: 1 million requests per month and 3.2 million seconds of compute time per month

Question 32

What are the Trial options?

Answer 32

250 hours per month for Medium, 50 hours per month of Large, and 125 hours per month of Large

Question 33

What is AWS Migration Evaluator?

Answer 33

Migration Evaluator (Formerly TSO Logic) lets you can gain access to insights and accelerate decision-making for migration to AWS at no cost.