Billing & Pricing Flashcards
Which AWS service will help you receive alerts when the reservation utilization falls below the defined threshold?
AWS Budgets
- Set custom budgets for cost/usage alerts
- Track reservation utilization for services like EC2, RDS, Redshift, ElastiCache, and Elasticsearch
- Alert when utilization drops below the threshold
Which AWS Support plan provides architectural guidance contextual to your specific use-cases?
AWS Business Support
- 24x7 phone, email, and chat support
- Architectural guidance for production workloads
- Access to AWS Trusted Advisor and Infrastructure Event Management
When transferring 500 GB of data between an EC2 instance and an S3 bucket within the same region, what charges apply?
No charge for this data transfer
- AWS does not charge for data transfer between services in the same region (e.g., EC2 to S3).
- Only outbound data transfer outside of the region incurs additional charges.
How will credits be applied to an AWS bill with two credits and charges for Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3?
Credit One ($100, expires July): Applied to the EC2 charge, reducing it to $900 EC2 and leaving the $500 S3 charge.
Credit Two ($50, expires December): Applied to the remaining $900 EC2 charge, reducing it to $850 EC2.
Outcome: Pay $850 for EC2 and $500 for S3, with all credits used up.
Credit application order:
- Soonest expiring
- Least applicable products
- Oldest credit
Which AWS support plan provides access to a designated Technical Account Manager (TAM)?
AWS Enterprise Support
- 24x7 technical support from high-quality engineers
- Designated Technical Account Manager (TAM)
- Proactive support and consultative architectural guidance
How does Amazon EFS pricing work?
Pay for the storage used (no pre-provisioning required)
Two storage classes:
- Standard: Higher cost, optimized for frequent access
- Infrequent Access (IA): Lower cost, but charges per read/write operation
No upfront costs; scales automatically with usage
How does Amazon EBS pricing work?
Billed based on provisioned storage, not actual usage
Different volume types (gp3, io1, sc1, etc.) with different pricing
Snapshots stored incrementally (you only pay for changed blocks after the first full snapshot)
Additional charges for IOPS on certain volume types (e.g., io1/io2)
How do Amazon EFS and Amazon EBS pricing models differ?
Amazon EBS: Charges for provisioned storage, even if unused
Amazon EFS: Charges for actual storage used
Amazon EBS Snapshots are incremental (only changed data is billed)
Amazon EFS IA class has per-access fees but lower storage costs
What budgeting tools are available in AWS to help manage costs and usage?
AWS Budgets allows tracking and managing service costs, usage, and reservations.
Helps set alerts for spending limits and usage thresholds.
Supports Cost Budgets (spending limits), Usage Budgets (service consumption limits), and Reservation Budgets (tracking Reserved Instance and Savings Plans utilization).
How can an organization receive separate AWS invoices for different environments (e.g., development and production)?
Create separate AWS accounts for each environment
- Each AWS account generates its own invoice
- Helps with cost tracking, security isolation, and governance
How do Cost Allocation Tags help with AWS billing and resource tracking?
- Tags consist of a key-value pair used to categorize AWS resources.
- AWS-generated and user-defined tags must be activated separately before appearing in Cost Explorer or cost reports.
- Help allocate costs by team, project, or environment for better financial visibility.
How does AWS Shield Advanced help protect against DDoS-related costs?
- AWS Shield Advanced provides cost protection for AWS services affected by DDoS attacks.
- Covers services like ELB, CloudFront, Route 53, EC2, and Global Accelerator.
- It is a paid service available independently of AWS Support plans.
What are the two main ways AWS Marketplace facilitates software sales?
Amazon Machine Image (AMI):
- Software bundled into customized AMIs.
- Customers can deploy pre-configured software on AWS.
Software as a Service (SaaS):
- Vendors offer SaaS solutions hosted on AWS.
- Customers access software without managing infrastructure.
Which AWS service can identify unattached or underutilized Amazon EBS Elastic Volumes?
AWS Trusted Advisor
- Provides cost optimization recommendations.
- Identifies underutilized or unattached EBS volumes to help reduce costs.
- Offers insights in five categories: Cost Optimization, Performance, Security, Fault Tolerance, and Service Limits.
How does AWS Organizations’ consolidated billing handle Reserved Instances (RIs) across multiple accounts?
- Reserved Instances (RIs) can be shared across accounts within the same AWS Organization to reduce costs.
- The discount applies only if the instances are launched in the same Availability Zone (AZ) where the RI was purchased.
- When RIs are used, AWS first applies them to matching instances, then charges the remainder at standard rates.
Which AWS service can be used to set up billing alarms to monitor estimated charges?
Amazon CloudWatch
- Allows users to create alarms for estimated AWS charges.
- Uses CloudWatch metrics for billing data.
- Sends alerts via Amazon SNS when charges exceed a specified threshold.
Which AWS service can be used to forecast AWS account usage and costs?
AWS Cost Explorer
- Provides visualization and historical analysis of AWS costs.
- Supports forecasting based on past usage trends.
- Helps users plan for future AWS expenses.
What costs should be included when estimating the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for moving to AWS?
Server administration costs, including IT labor for managing infrastructure.
Power and cooling expenses, which are typically included in on-premises data centers.
AWS Pricing Calculator helps compare on-premises vs. AWS costs by considering servers, storage, networking, and IT labor.
What AWS service helps monitor costs and optimize a Savings Plan?
AWS Cost Explorer
- Provides detailed cost and usage analysis across AWS services.
- Offers forecasting and savings recommendations for Reserved Instances and Savings Plans.
- Users can filter by AWS Service, Region, and Account to track spending patterns.
What are the best practices when using AWS Organizations to manage multiple AWS accounts?
Create AWS accounts per department
- Helps with better resource isolation and compliance requirements.
- Enables more granular cost tracking and security policies.
Restrict account privileges using Service Control Policies (SCP)
- Provides permission guardrails for AWS IAM users and roles.
- Enforces security policies across multiple AWS accounts.
- AWS Organizations helps centrally manage billing, security, compliance, and resource sharing.
- Allows automation of account creation and policy enforcement.
- Simplifies consolidated billing across accounts.
Which AWS services do not have additional charges?
- AWS Elastic Beanstalk – No extra cost; you pay only for the AWS resources it provisions (e.g., EC2, S3).
- AWS Auto Scaling – Free to use; you only pay for the scaled resources and CloudWatch monitoring.
- AWS IAM – Free; you pay only for the AWS services you use with IAM policies.
- AWS CloudFormation – No charge for the service itself; you only pay for the underlying resources it provisions.
- AWS VPC – Free to create and use; costs apply for NAT gateways, VPNs, and data transfers.
What is included in the AWS Basic Support Plan?
- Free for all AWS customers
- Support for account & billing questions
- Service health checks
- Access to AWS documentation, whitepapers, and best practice guides
- Access to AWS support forums
- No technical support cases
What is included in the AWS Developer Support Plan?
- Starts at $29/month
- Includes all Basic Support features
- Email support during business hours
- General guidance response time: 24 hours
- System impaired response time: 12 hours
- Access to core Trusted Advisor checks
What is included in the AWS Business Support Plan?
- Starts at $100/month (or based on usage)
- Includes all Developer Support features
- 24/7 phone, chat, and email support
- Production system impaired response time: 4 hours
- Production system down response time: 1 hour
- Full AWS Trusted Advisor checks
- AWS Health API access
What is included in the AWS Enterprise On-Ramp Support Plan?
- Starts at $5,500/month
- Includes all Business Support features
- Response time for critical issues: 30 minutes
- Access to an AWS Concierge team for billing & account guidance
- Infrastructure event management
What is included in the AWS Enterprise Support Plan?
- Starts at $15,000/month (or based on usage)
- Includes all Enterprise On-Ramp Support features
- Designated Technical Account Manager (TAM)
- Response time for critical issues: 15 minutes
- Proactive architectural and operational guidance
- Access to AWS Infrastructure Event Management
What are the two types of AWS Savings Plans?
Compute Savings Plans: Offer flexibility across instance types, regions, OS, and also apply to AWS Fargate & Lambda. Up to 66% savings.
EC2 Instance Savings Plans: Offer the highest discounts (up to 72%) for specific instance families within a region.
