Cloud Economics & Billing

Question 1

Fundamental Drivers of Cost w/ AWS

Answer 1

• Compute (hour/sec @ instance type)
• Storage (per GB)
• Data Transfer (aggregated outbound, per GB)
  
  • typically inbound and between services is free

Question 2

How Pay for AWS

Answer 2

• Pay for what you use
• Pay less when you reserve
• Pay less when you use more and as AWS grows

Question 3

AWS Services w/ No Charge

Answer 3

• VPC
• Elastic Beanstalk
• Auto Scaling
• AWS Cloud Formation
• AWS IAM

w/ some exceptions:

• Inbound data transfer (EC2 and some others)
• data transfer between services (within the same region)

Free tier is only some services (not unlimited)

Question 4

Total Cost of Ownership

Answer 4

Financial estimate of Direct and Indirect costs of a service

• Server Costs
• Storage Costs
• Network Costs
• IT Labor Costs

Question 5

AWS Pricing Calculator

Answer 5

• Estimate Monthly Costs
• Identify opportunities to reduce cost
• model solutions before building them
• explore price points and calculations
• find instance types and contract terms that meet needs
• name estimate and name groups of services

Question 6

Pricing: Additional Benefits

Answer 6

Hard Benefits

• Reduced spending on compute, storage, networking, security
• reduction in hardware and software capex
• reductions in operational costs, backup, an disaster recovery
• reduction in operations personnel

Soft Benefits

• reuse of service and applications by using same cloud service
• increased developer productivity
• improved customer satisfaction
• agile business practices
• increase in global reach

Question 7

AWS Organizations

Answer 7

Features

• Free… manage via Console, CLI, SDK, HTTPS Query API
• Allows grouping accounts by organization - Organizational Units
• policy based account management
• group based account management
• APIs that automate account management
• consolidated billing

DOES NOT replace IAM… GROUPS ACCOUNTS, not users

Service Control Policies allow or deny access to AWS services for individuals or group accounts in an Organizational Unit (OU)

Question 8

AWS Billing & Cost Management Tools

Answer 8

Billing Dashboard: status of month-to-date, trending, spend summary last month, by service

AWS Budgets: create notifications/alerts via email or SNS

AWS Cost & Usage Report: for each service category in line items, can update once per day

AWS Cost Explorer

AWS Bills

Question 9

Technical Support Plans

Answer 9

Proactive Guidance: Technical Account Manager (TAM) - only via Enterprise Support Plan

Best Practices: AWS Trusted Advisor (automated service)

Account Assistance: AWS Support Concierge (non-technical)

Plans

• Basic: no case support
• Developer: normal (12h), low (24h)
• Business: urgent (1h), high (4h), normal (12h), low (24h)
• Enterprise: critical (15m), urgent (1h), high (4h), normal (12h), low (24h)

Question 10

Pay Less When You Reserve

Answer 10

Options:

• AURI: All Upfront Reserved Instance - Largest Discount
• PURI: Partial Upfront Reserved Instance - Lower DIscount
• NURI: No Upfront Payments Reserved - Smallest Discount

Do not need to make a full upfront payment

Question 11

AWS Group

Answer 11

Collection of IAM users that are managed as a unit.

An organization has a large number of technical employees who operate their AWS Cloud infrastructure. What does AWS provide to help organize them into teams and then assign the appropriate permissions for each team?

Question 12

EC2 Billing

Answer 12

• per-second, minimum 60 seconds
• Instance type
• load balancing

Question 13

AWS Savings Plans

Answer 13

Sign up for 1+ year term

Compute: EC2, Fargate, Lambda

Machine Learning: SageMaker