Billing and Pricing (16%) Flashcards
What are the 3 fundamental drivers of cost?
1) Compute – hourly from launch to termination
2) Storage –data you store in the cloud.
3) Outbound data transfer- data in flight moving between systems
What are the three types of free offers available depending on the service you choose? (3)
1) 12 months free – 12 months’ free usage after initial sign-up with AWS
2) Always free –offers do not expire and are available to all AWS customers
3) Trials – short-term free trials starting from the date you activate a particular service
What is the financial estimate that helps you understand both the direct & indirect costs of AWS?
What Q’s would it help answer? (2)
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
- Will help answer questions like ‘how much does it cost to migrate to the AWS cloud?’
- And how can I reduce my TCO using AWS?
Which service helps you plan migration projects to the AWS cloud?
Two benefits?
Application Discovery Service
- Used to estimate TCO
- Works with other services to migrate servers
How to reduce TCO using AWS? (3)
1) Minimize capital expenditures
2) Utilize reserved instances to lock in savings
3) Size your resources to your usage needs
What allows you to query the price of AWS services using JSON or HTML?
What is a benefit? (1)
AWS Price List API
- Can receive price alerts when prices change
What allows you to set custom budgets that alert you when your costs or usage exceed your budgeted amount?
Budgets
What are the budget types? (3)
1) Cost Budgets - plan how much you want to spend on a service
2) Usage Budgets – plan how much you want to use on one or more services
3) Reservation Budgets – set RIs or savings plans utilization or coverage targets.
How are budgets used in the real world?
You can monitor your free tier usage to ensure you don’t accidentally exceed free tier limits & incur unwanted costs. You can set up an alert notification for when your account is approaching a particular dollar amount.
What contains the most comprehensive set of cost & usage data?
Benefits? (2)
Cost & Usage Report
- Can download a detailed & comprehensive report that lists usage for each service
- Can aggregate usage data on a daily, hourly, or monthly level
What allows you to visualize & forecast your costs & usage over time?
What is a benefit? (1)
Cost Explorer
Benefit:
- Can view past 12 months & forecast up to 3 months in future
How is Cost Explorer used in the real world?
if you are considering your options for Savings Plans, AWS Cost Explorer can analyze your EC2 usage over the past 7, 30, or 60 days.
What is useful for tracking spend?
Benefits? (2)
Cost Allocation Tags.
- Allow you to label resources using a key & value pair
- Allow you to track costs via the cost allocation report
What helps you maintain control over cost, compliance, and security across your AWS accounts?
Governance Services
What allows you to centrally manage (consolidate) multiple AWS accounts under one umbrella?
What are the benefits? (4)
Organizations.
What are the benefits of using Organizations? (3)
1) Consolidated billing – receive 1 bill for multiple accounts
2) Cost savings – receive volume discounts since usage is combined across accounts
3) Account governance – a quick & automated way to create accounts or invite existing accounts
What is used to enforce permissions you want everyone in the organization to follow?
Service Control Policies (SCPs)
What are a grouping of AWS accounts that are similar (e.g. IT organization unit, marketing organization unit)
Organization Units (OUs)
What helps you ensure your accounts conform to company-wide policies?
What are the benefits? (4)
Control Tower.-
- Helps set up new accounts using a multi-account strategy
- Works directly with AWS organizations
- Enforces the best use of services across accounts
- Provides a dashboard to help manage accounts
How is control tower used in the real world?
you can disallow public write access to all S3 buckets across your accounts
Which service gives you visibility & control over your AWS resources?
What are the benefits (3)
Systems Manager
Benefits:
- Can operate operational tasks on your resources
- Can group resources like EC2 instances, RDS buckets and take action
- Can automatically patch and run commands on multiple EC2 instances or manage RDS instances
How is Systems Manager used in the real world?
if you want to deploy an operating system and software patches automatically across a large group of instances, Systems manager allows you to auto-patch software running on EC2 instances according to a schedule.
What provides real-time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices?
Benefits? (2)
Trusted Advisor
- Checks your account & makes recommendations
- Helps you see service limits and understand best practices
Example of popular recommendations made by Trusted Advisor? (3)
- Checks for unrestricted access for specific ports on EC2 instances (free check)
- Checks S3 bucket permissions to determine if there is public access (free check)
- Checks for MFA on your root account (free check)
How is Trusted Advisor used in the real world?
if you want to check read and write capacity service limits for DynamoDB, Trusted Advisor helps reduce your overall costs by monitoring service limits.
What helps you manage on-premises and AWS software licenses?
What can it track? (3)
License Manager
- Able to track licenses for Oracle, Microsoft, SAP
What helps you provision & manage SSL/TLS certificates?
Benefits (2)
Certificate Manager
- Provides public & private certificates for free
- Integrates with Elastic Load Balancing and API Gateway
Which service helps you efficiently operate your AWS infrastructure?
Benefits? (3)
Managed Services
- Augments your internal staff
- Provides ongoing management of your infrastructure
- Reduces operational risks & overhead
Managed Services in the real world?
can increase your operational efficiency by helping you develop application-specific health monitoring using CloudWatch
What helps helps enterprise customers move to a cloud-based operating model?
What will they do? (3)
Professional Services
- They will propose, architect, and help implement solutions
What is a global community of approved partners that offer software solutions & consulting services for AWS?
Benefits? (3)
AWS Partner Network (APN)
Benefits:
- Offer technology partners that provide software solutions
- Provides consulting partners that offer professional services
- Find approved vendors with deep AWS expertise
APN in the real world?
if you need help designing & building a new application.
What is a digital catalog of pre-built solutions you can purchase or license. Also a place you can sell your own solutions to others?
Marketplace
What alerts you to events that might impact your AWS environment?
Benefits? (2)
Personal Health Dashboard
- Provides troubleshooting guidance
- Feedback tailored to your specific environment
What are the four Support Plans and what are they recommended for? (4)
1) Basic – included for free for all AWS accounts
2) Developer – starts at $29 a month and is recommended for testing & development
3) Business – starts at $100 a month and is recommended for production workloads
4) Enterprise –starts at $15,000 a month and is recommended for business or mission-critical production workloads
What are the Support Case Types (you can open with AWS Support)? (3)
1) Account & Billing (can be opened by all support plans)
2) Service Limit Increases (guardrails so you don’t run up the bill on your account) (can be opened by all support plans)
3) Technical Support – can only be opened by customers on paid plans (developer, business, or enterprise)
***AWS Support does not allow cases for code development, debugging custom software, or performing system administration tasks
Basic Support Plan – included for free for all AWS accounts
Benefits? (2)
a. Gives access to account & billing support cases & service limit increases
b. Customer service 24/7 access via email only and access to discussion forums
Developer Support Plan – starts at $29 a month and is recommended for testing & development
Benefits? (4)
a. Gives access to account & billing support cases & service limit increases &technical support
b. Allowed 1 primary contact
c. Can open unlimited support cases
d. Have access to a Cloud Support Associate during business hours via email (SLA: <24 hours for general guidance, <12 hours if system is impaired)
Business Support Plan – starts at $100 a month and is recommended for production workloads
Benefits (4)
a. Gives access to account & billing support cases & service limit increases &technical support
b. Allowed unlimited contacts, unlimited cases
c. Can access a full set of trusted advisor checks
d. Have 24/7 access to Cloud Support Engineers via chat, email or phone
(SLAs: < 24 hours general guidance, < 4 hours production system impaired, < 12 hours system impaired, < 1 hour production system down)
Enterprise Support Plan - starts at $15,000 a month and is recommended for business or mission-critical production workloads
Benefits? (7)
a. Gives access to account & billing support cases & service limit increases &technical support
b. Allowed unlimited Contacts, unlimited cases
c. Have a designated TAM to monitor your environment & provide proactive guidance
d. Have access to concierge support team (billing & account questions)
e. Access to infrastructure event management
f. Access to full set trusted advisor sets
g. Have 24/7 access to Cloud Support Engineers via chat, email or phone
(SLAs: < 24 hours general guidance, < 4 hours production system impaired, < 12 hours system impaired, < 1 hour production system down, <15 min for business critical system down)
What is the difference between AWS Partner Network & APN Consulting Partners?
AWS Partner Network – build solutions & services for customers
APN Consulting Partners - help customers design, architect, build, migrate, and manage workloads and applications, accelerating their migration to AWS Cloud
