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.
Savings Plans
They come in three kinds:
- Compute Savings Plans: have the most flexibility and help to reduce your costs by up to 66%. They apply automatically to EC2 instance usage regardless of instance family, size, AZ, region, OS or tenancy. Also applies to Fargate and Lambda usage.
- EC2 Instance Savings Plans - provides the lowest prices, offering savings of up to 72% in exchange for a commitment to the usage of individual instance families in a region. Applies to all instances in a region regardless of AZ, size, OS, or tenancy.
- Amazon SageMaker Savings Plans - flexible pricing model for SageMaker, in exchange for a commitment to a consistent amount of usage ($/hour) for a one- or three-year term. Helps reduce costs by up to 64%.
Consolidated Billing
This is when AWS combines the usage from all accounts to determine which volume pricing tiers to apply, giving you a lower overall price whenever possible. Thus, volume pricing is the main benefit.
Convertible RI (Reserved Instance)
It costs more than a Standard RI and doesn’t utilise unused EC2 capacity. But it’s more flexible than a Standard RI.
It allows the change of instance family, OS, tenancy, and payment option. Has the capability to change the attributes of the RI as long as the exchange results in the creation of RI’s of equal or greater value.
Reservations models are available for Amazon RDS, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon DynamoDB.
Basic Support Plan
- 24/7 access to customer service, documentation, whitepapers, and AWS re:Post
- AWS Trusted Advisor
- AWS Health
Developer Support Plan
for those experimenting or testing in AWS
Benefits:
- General Guidance: < 24 hours
- System Impaired: < 12 hours
- Architectural Guidance: General
- Access to Support Automation Workflows with prefix AWSSupport
- Service Quota and basic Security checks
- Business hours web access to Cloud Support Asssociates; unlimited cases and unlimited contacts (IAM supported)
- Prioritised responses on AWS re:Post
Business Support Plan
For those with production workloads in AWS
Benefits:
- General guidance: < 24 hours
- System impaired: < 12 hours
- Production system impaired: < 4 hours
- Production system down: < 1 hour
- Architectural Guidance: contextual to your use-case
- Access to Support Automation Workflows with prefixes AWSSupport and AWSPremiumSupport; AWS Countdown Premium is available for Business Support customers as a monthly subscription for an additional fee
- Full set of checks
- 24/7 phone, web, and chat access to Cloud Support Engineers; unlimited cases and unlimited contacts (IAM supported); prioritised responses on AWS re:Post; access to AWS Support App in Slack
- AWS Support API
- Interoperability and configuration guidance and troubleshooting
Enterprise On-Ramp Support Plan
For those who have production and/or business critical workloads in AWS
Benefits:
- General guidance: < 24 hours
- System impaired: < 12 hours
- Production system impaired: < 4 hours
- Production system down: < 1 hour
- Business-critical system down: < 30 minutes
- Architectural Guidance: annual consultative review and guidance based on your applications
- Access to Support Automation Workflows with prefixes AWSSupport and AWSPremiumSupport; Annual proactive security review; Enterprise On-Ramp customers receive one engagement of AWS Countdown each year at no cost. AWS Countdown Premium is available as a monthly subscription for an additional fee.
- A pool of Technical Account Managers to provide proactive guidance, and coordinate access to programs and AWS experts
- Full set of checks
- 24/7 phone, web, and chat access to Cloud Support Engineers; Unlimited cases and unlimited contacts (IAM supported); Prioritized responses on AWS re:Post; Access to AWS Support App in Slack
- White-glove access to billing issues
- AWS Support API
- Interoperability and configuration guidance and troubleshooting
- Access to AWS Managed Services (AMS) for an additional fee. AMS augments your existing teams with cloud advanced operations skills and capacity. Includes baseline operations, a designated Cloud Service Delivery Manager (CSDM), Cloud Architect (CA), and access to the AMS security team.
-Access AWS re:Post Private for an additional fee. re:Post Private is a knowledge service to accelerate cloud adoption and increase developer productivity. With re:Post Private, you can build an organization-specific cloud community that drives efficiencies at scale and provides access to valuable knowledge resources.
Enterprise Support Plan
Similar to Enterprise On-Ramp, but even better service. For those with business and/or mission critical workloads in AWS.
AWS Charges
- Data transferred between two different Regions.
- Data transferred between the AWS network and the public internet.
- All Elastic IP addresses in your account, even ones not associated with a running Instance.
