Ch. 3 Content - Billing & Pricing Flashcards
What are the 5 basic AWS pricing policies?
- Pay as you go - pay when you use things
- Pay less when you reserve
- Pay even less per unit when you use more; the more resources that you use, the less you pay
- Pay even less as AWS grows
- Custom pricing
What are the 3 fundamental drivers for cost in AWS?
- Compute
- Storage
- Data Outbound
What are the 7 x FREE AWS services?
- VPC (this is a virtual DC in the cloud; where VMs live)
- Elastic Beanstalk (not the services it provisions)
- CloudFormation (not the services it provisions)
- IAM (Identity Access Management)
- Autoscaling
- Opsworks
- Consolidated Billing
What is AWS Budgets?
When do you want to set this?
This gives you the ability to set custom budgets that alert you when your cost or usage goes above the amount set, or when they are forecasted to go above the budgeted amount.
You want to set the thresholds before the cost has been incurred.
What is AWS Cost Explorer?
When do you want to set this?
GUI that allows you to visualize, understand and manage your AWS costs and usage over time.
Used to looks at costs after they’ve been incurred.
What are the 4 AWS Support Plans?
What are the SLAs associated?
- Basic - TAC support via email only. Single user can open tickets.
- Developer - email/chat/phone during Biz hours. Support <12 hours
- Business - Prod system impaired < 4 hours; Prod system down < 1 hour
- Enterprise - Prod system impaired < 4 hours; Prod system down < 15 min
What are Tags? What do they contain?
Tags are key value pairs attached to AWS resources that contain metadata about the resource. Tags can include: Region, Name, EmployeeID, Department, etc.
Tags can be inherited when resources get assigned. Ex - if your create a new department (like HR) via a CloudFormation template, all the resources provisioned from that template will inherit the “HR” tag.
What is a Resource Group? How are they organized?
A Resource Group makes it easy/organized to group together resources using the tags that are assigned to them when provisioned. Resources can be grouped together by sharing 1 or multiple tags.
How can you apply automation via Tags?
AWS Systems Manager allows you to apply changes to entire fleets of EC2 instances with a single click.
What is Tag Editor?
This is a Global service that allows you to discover resources via Tags and add additional tags if needed.
What feature allows you to consolidate multiple AWS accounts?
AWS Organizations
What is AWS Organizations? What are the options for AWS Orgs?
AWS Orgs is an account management service that enables you to consolidate multiple AWS accounts into an org that you create and centrally mange. The options are:
- Full features (Org Units, Root Account, Policy, multiple accounts)
- Consolidated Billing only
This is a feature that must be turned ON.
What is a Root Account?
This is the main AWS Organizational Account. From this account, you can assign different “Organizational Units” or OU’s - HR, Finance, Devs, etc. and attach smaller sub-accounts to each OU.
What is Consolidated Billing?
This is a feature option within AWS Orgs that allows you to create a single “Paying Account” and then link smaller sub-accounts to it so that you pay 1 single consolidated bill.
HR, Devs, & Finance incur their own bills, but they all get dumped into the Paying Account which then pays the overall bill. This allows you to qualify for higher discounts via tiered pricing incentives.
What are advantages of Consolidated Billing?
- single bill per AWS Root account
- easy to track charges and allocate costs
- volume pricing discounts (higher tier = higher discounts)
