Billing and Pricing Flashcards
In general, how does payment for AWS work?
AWS works on a pay as you go model in which you only pay for what you use, when you are using it.
There are no upfront charges and you stop paying for a service when you stop using it.
Volume discounts are available so the more you use a service the cheaper it gets (per unit used).
There are no termination fees.
What is the exception to not being able to terminate whenever you’d like?
EC2 reserved instances
What are the 3 fundamental drives of cost with AWS?
- Compute
- Storage
- Outbound data transfer
What are the free services?
- Amazon 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)
- OpsWorks
- Consolidated Billing
How long are reservation terms?
1 or 3 years
What is S3 pricing determined by?
- Storage class – e.g. 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, e.g. GET, PUT, POST, LIST, COPY
- Lifecycle transitions requests – moving data between storage classes
- Data transfer – data transferred out of an S3 region is charged
What is RDS pricing determined by?
- Clock hours of server uptime – amount of time the DB instance is running
- Database characteristics – e.g. database engine, size and memory class
- Database purchase type – e.g. On-Demand, Reserved
- Number of database instances
- Provisioned storage – backup is included up to 100% of the size of the DB. After the DB is terminated backup storage is charged per GB per month
- Additional storage – the amount of storage in addition to the provisioned storage is charged per GB per month.
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
- Reserved Instances – RDS RIs can be purchased with No Upfront, Partial Upfront, or All Upfront terms
What is CloudFront pricing determined by?
- 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).
What are the 4 AWS support plans?
- Basic – billing and account support only (access to forums only) // access to 7 advisor checks // access to personal health dashboard
- Developer – business hours support via email // access to 7 advisor checks // access to personal health dashboard // 1 primary contact
- Business – 24×7 email, chat and phone support // access to full advisor checks // access to health API as well // unlimited contacts
- Enterprise – 24×7 email, chat and phone support (and also a Technical Account Manager) // access to full advisor checks // access to health API as well // unlimited contacts // support for business critical down
What is a tag?
Tags are key / value pairs that can be attached to AWS resources.
Tags contain metadata (data about data).
What is a resource group?
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.
What is the difference between AWS cost calculators?
The AWS Cost Explorer is a free tool that allows you to view charts of your costs.
The AWS Simple Monthly Calculator helps customers and prospects estimate their monthly AWS bill more efficiently.
The TCO calculator is a free tool provided by AWS that allows you to estimate the cost savings of using the AWS Cloud vs. using an on-premised data center.
How does AWS charge for EC2?
EC2 instances are charged per hour or per second.
