Billing and Pricing Flashcards
Tags
These are metadata you can assign to AWS resources. Each tag has a user-defined key and value. Tags are great for managing, identifying, organising, searching for, and filtering resources.
Usually, tags correspond to a business unit, customer, or project.
AWS CUR (Cost & Usage Report)
Has the most comprehensive set of cost and usage data available. Can use AWS CUR to publish your AWS billing reports to an AWS S3 bucket that you own. Can receive reports that break down your costs by the hour or month, by product or product resource, or by stages that you define yourself.
Can load cost and usage information into Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon QuickSight. It also provides granular data about your AWS costs and usage.
AWS CUR can’t forecast AWS account cost and usage. It can’t identify underutilized EC2 Instances.
AWS Budgets
Can set custom budgets that alert you when costs or usage exceed (or are forecasted to exceed) your budgeted amount. Can also use AWS Budgets to set reservation utilisation or coverage targets and receive alerts when your utilisation drops below the threshold you define.
Budgets can be done at the monthly, quarterly, or yearly level. Can customise start and end dates. Can refine budgets with multiple dimensions, such as AWS service, linked account, tag, and others.
Can’t be used to forecast AWS account and usage. Can’t be used to identify undertutilised EC2 Instances.
AWS Pricing Calculator
Lets you explore AWS services and create an estimate for the cost of your use cases on AWS. Can model your solutions before building them, explore the price points and calculations behind your estimate, and find the available instance types and contract terms that meet your needs.
Can’t use this to forecast your AWS account cost and usage.
AWS Marketplace
A digital catalogue with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors that make it easy to find, test, buy, and deploy software that runs on AWS.
You can sell amazon Machine Images (AMI’s) and Software as a Service (SaaS).
You can’t sell compliance documents from third-party vendors Amazon EC2Standard RI’s (Reserved Instances). You can’t raise requests for purchasing AWS Direct Connect connection (done so through the AWS management console).
Amazon EC2 RI’s (Reserved Instances)
These give a significant discount (up to 72%) compared to On-Demand pricing. Also has a capacity reservation when used in a specific AZ. Can be purchased for a one-year or three-year commitment, with the 3-year instance offering a bigger discount. A reserved instance can’t be interrupted.
Payment options:
- All upfront
- Partial upfront, with discounted hourly rate
- No upfront, just a discounted hourly rate
Auto Scaling Group
Has a set of Amazon EC2 Instances treated as a logical grouping for automatic scaling and management. Can adjust the size to meet demand either manually or via automatic scaling.
Vertical Scaling
This is when you increase the performance on individual units, such as upgrading a single EC2 Instance by adding CPU’s, memory, and storage. It can be more expensive than scaling horizontally.
Also called scaling up.
Horizontal Scaling
This is when you increase the number of individual units without upgrading them individually, such as adding more EC2 Instances of identical specs.
Also called scaling up.
AWS Support
A type of service plan that offers customer service, AWS documentation, whitepapers, and support forums.
AWS EC2 Instance Billing
There’s a one-minute minimum charge for Linux-based EC2 Instances.
Amazon CloudWatch
Main focus is resource performance monitoring, events, and alerts.
A monitoring and observability service, which can provide data and actionable insights to monitor applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimise resource utilisation, and get a unified view of operational health.
Amazon CloudWatch Events can help set notifications for resource usage, such as Amazon EBS.
It can’t track underutilized volume usage for Amazon EBS. Can’t be used to identify underutilized EC2 Instances.
Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instance
An instance that can be used on-demand. You have full control over its lifecycle - launch, stop, hibernate, start, reboot, or termination. No long-term commitment when purchasing. Only pay for it when using it.
Great for uninterruptible workloads running for a short period of time.
Not as cost-effective as Reserve Instances.
Amazon EC2 Spot Instance
An unused EC2 Instance that is available for less than the On-Demand price. Discounts that can be up to 90%. Great for data analysis, batch jobs, background processing, and optional tasks. Can be terminated at short notice, so not suitable for critical workloads needed at specific times.
Amazon EC2 Dedicated Host
A physical server fully dedicated for your use.
It lets you use your eligible software licenses from vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle on Amazon EC2. This gives you the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of using your licenses with the simplicity and flexibility of AWS.
Helps you address compliance requirements and reduce costs by allowing you to use your existing server-bound software licenses.
Not as cost-effective as an On-Demand Instances.
