Domain 4: Billing and Pricing Flashcards
What is AWS Organizations and what is it used for?
Organizations offer policy-based, account management Service
Centrally Managed
Consolidate multiple AWS accounts and apply policies to those groups.
Organizations can also be used :
- to help automate the creation of new accounts
through API’s
- to simplify the billing for multiple accounts.
What is a Service Control Policy?
Policies that centrally control AWS service use across multiple AWS accounts.
What are the main features/benefits of Organizations?
- Centrally manage access policies across multiple AWS accounts
- Control access to AWS services
- Automate AWS account creation and management
- Consolidate billing across multiple AWS accounts
What is consolidated billing?
Within Organizations, the ability to set a single payment method for all AWS accounts in your organization.
What are the benefits of consolidated billing?
- Central location to manage billing across all your AWS accounts
- Take advantage of pricing benefits of aggregated usage (i.e. volume based discounts) across all your AWS accounts
What are the four principles of how AWS pricing works?
- Pay as you go: Only pay for what you use, when you are using it. No upfront costs and charges immediately end when you stop using a particular service or feature
- No long term contracts or complex licensing
- Volume based discounts are available
- There are no termination fees
- Free tier option is available to those new to AWS. Limited resources are available free for charge for 12 months
What is the S3 pricing model?
- How much data you store
- Applies to data at rest in S3
- Charged per GB stored (volume based discounts)
- Price per GB varies by region and storage class - Request Pricing (Moving data in/out of S3)
- PUT, POST, LIST, GET (API Request)
- Lifecycle transitions request
- Data retrieval, data archive, data restore
What is the EC2 pricing model?
Charged per second (based on an hourly rate)
for the amount of time the instance is running
applies to on-demand and spot instances).
Reserved instances are in 1 or 3 year terms,
regardless of use.
Hourly rates depend on:
- The purchasing option (On-demand, Spot, Reserved)
- Instance type (AKA processing power)
- AMI Type
- Linux (price varies based on distro/software pkgs)
- Windows (price varies based on version/software pkgs) - Region
NOTE: You are also charged for transferring data in/out of an instance on a per GB basis
What is the TCO Calculator?
Total Cost of Ownership calculator: Free tool provided by AWS that allows yo to estimate the cost savings of using the AWS cloud vs using on-premises data center
What are the main features/benefits of using the TCO Calculator?
- By showing how much you can save using AWS, it helps to reduce the TCO by avoiding large capital expenditures on IT hardware and infrastructure
- Can provide directional guidance on cost savings
- Works by you inputting elements of your current or theoretical on-premises data center, and comparing those cost requirements to how much it would cost in AWS.
- Elements can be added/modified as you move through the process to best estimate cost savings
What is AWS Cost Explorer?
Free tool that allows you to view charts of your AWS costs
What are the main features/benefits of using Cost Explorer?
- View cost data for the last 13 months
- Forecast how much you are likely to spend over the next three months
- Discover patterns in how much you spend on AWS resources over time - and identify cost problem areas
- Identify which services you use the most, and/or metrics like which availability zones have the most traffic, or which linked AWS account is used the most.
What are the AWS support plans available and starting prices?
- Basic: Included with any AWS account
- Developer: Starts at $29/month
- Business: $100/month
- Enterprise: $15,000/month
What is the support access associated with each support level?
Basic: No access to cloud support representative
Developer: Business hours email only access to a cloud support associate
Business: 24x7 access to a cloud support engineer
Enterprise: 24x7 access to a Senior cloud support engineer
What is an AWS Trusted Advisor?
Online resource to help you reduce cost, increase performance, and increase security by optimizing your AWS environment.
Provides real time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices
What are the 5 Trusted Advisor Categories?
- Cost Optimization
- Performance
- Security
- Fault Tolerance
- Service Limits
How many Trusted Advisor “checks” come with each support plan?
Basic: 7 core checks
Developer: 7 core checks
Business: Full set of checks
Enterprise: Full set of checks
What are the 7 core Trusted Advisor checks included in all support plans?
- Security Groups (port checks)
- IAM use
- Is MFA enabled on the root user account
- EBS public snapshots
- RDS public snapshots
- Service Limits
- S3 Bucket Permissions
What features of Trusted Advisor are only available to the business and enterprise support plans?
- Notifications to stay up to date with your AWS resource deployment with weekly updates
- Access to the full list of trusted advisor checks
- Programmatic access to retrieve/refresh Trusted Advisor results via AWS support API
What do you do if you think your AWS account has been compromised?
- Change your AWS root account password
- Change all IAM user’s passwords
- Delete or rotate all programmatic access keys
- Delete any resources in your account that you did not create
- Respond to any notifications that you received from AWS through the AWS support center and/or contact AWS support to open a support case
What are AWS white papers?
Collection of technical documents that outline many relevant AWS topics such as (but not limited to):
- Architecture best practices
- Security best practices
- Cloud Computing economics
- Serverless architecture
All white papers have been reviewed and approved by AWS, independent analysts, or the AWS community (customers or partners)
What is AWS service documentation?
Collection of documents specific to each AWS service. Provide detailed technical explanations and walkthroughs on how to use each service and its features.
What is the AWS philosophy on pricing?
Start or stop using a product any time
End of month only pay for what you use
No long term contracts
What are the offerings of the free tier that expire after 12 months?
EC2
S3
Amazon RDS
Cloudfront
(all have limits)
What are the 5 basic AWS pricing policies?
Pay as you go
Pay less when you reserve
Pay less by using more
Pay less as AWS grows
Custom pricing
Linux EC2 instances are charged by the _____ and Windows instances are currently charged by the _____
minute
hour
Is it possible to get custom pricing for AWS?
Yes for huge accounts
What are the free services for AWS?
VPC
Elastic Beanstalk (not the provisioned resources)
CloudFormation (provisions not free)
IAM
Auto Scaling (extra instances not free)
Opsworks
Consolidated Billing
What are the three fundamental charges for AWS?
Compute
Storage
Data Out (In free)
What specific things determine EC2 charges?
Clock hours of server
Machine Configuration
Instance Type
Number of instances
Load Balancing
Detailed Monitoring
Auto Scaling Instances
Elastic IP Addresses
OS and Software Package
What is the pricing options for EC2 reserved instances?
1-year (no down payment)
1-year (partial down)
1-year (100% down)
3-year (partial down)
3-year(100% down)
What determines S3 prices
Storage class (Standard or IA)
Storage Amount
Requests (GET, PUT, COPY)
Data Transfer (in free, out costs)
What determines RDS price?
Server clock hours
DB options (Multi-AZ, Read Replicas, License Type)
Size of instance
Number of instances
Provisioned storage
Additional Storage
Requests
Deployment Type (Multi-AZ, Read Replicas)
Data Transfer (out)
What determines CloudFront pricing?
Traffic Distribution
Requests
Data Transfer Out
What are the available support plans, currently?
Basic
Developer
Business
Enterprise
What are the characteristics of the Basic Support Plan?
Free
Forums Only
What are the characteristics of the Developer Support Plan?
$29/month
Business Hour by Email
1 person - unlimited cases
What are the characteristics of the Business Support Plan?
$100/month
24x7, email, chat, phone
Unlimited contacts
Unlimited Cases
What are the characteristics of the Enterprise Support Plan?
$15,000/month
24 x 7 email, chat, phone
Dedicated Acct Manager (TAM)
Unlimited Contacts, Cases
What is the response time for Basic support plan?
None
What is the response time for Developer support plan?
General Guidance = < 24 business hours
System Impaired = < 12 business hours
What is the response time for Business support plan?
General Guidance = < 24 hours
System Impaired = < 12 hours
Production System Impaired = < 4 hours
Production System Down = < 1 hour
What is the response time for Enterprise support plan?
EXAM *
General Guidance = < 24 hours
System Impaired = < 12 hours
Production System Impaired = < 4 hours
Production System Down = < 1 hour
Business-critical system down = < 15 minutes
Can applied tags be inherited?
Yes, where a service provisions other resources
e.g
Autoscaling
Cloudformation
Elastic Beanstalk
In consolidated billing what are the characteristics of the root account?
Known as the Paying Account
Linked accounts roll up
All charges flow through that account
Max of 20 linked accounts
What are the advantages of using Consolidated Billing?
One bill per AWS account
Easy to track charges
Easy cost allocation
Volume discounts for all linked accounts
Spread reserved EC2 instances
Aggregation into CloudTrail
What are the best practices for the paying account in consolidated billing?
Enable MFA
Strong/Complex passwords
Do NOT deploy resources with this account
When creating an AWS Organization, what are the two choices?
All features
Consolidated billing only
What does the AWS Simple Monthly Calendar do?
Allows you to model infrastructure options to determine monthly pricing estimate.
Does not provide Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
What are Quickstarts?
Templates in Cloudformation that easily provision infrastructures.
Best practices
Security
Scalability
All necessary components
What does the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator Do?
Allows you to determine your on-prem costs vs projected AWS costs for the same thing. Broken down by
Server
Storage
Network
IT-Labor
What are the AWS Key principles of pricing?
Understand the fundamentals
Start early with cost optimization
Maximize the power of flexibility
Use the right pricing model for the job
What does Amazon mean by “Start early with cost optimization”?
Put cost and visibility control mechanisms in place before the environment grows large and complex.
What does Amazon mean by the pricing principle of “maximizing the power of flexibility”?
Paying for services as-needed and when needed allows your business to focus on innovation and invention
What does Amazon mean by the principle of “using the right pricing model for the job?” (applies to all offerings)
Choosing on demand, dedicated instances, spot instances or reserved instances
What is the pricing model for Lambda?
Number of Requests
Free - Limited to 1 million requests/month
$0.20 per million after
Duration
400,000 GB Seconds/month
Up to 3.2 million seconds of compute time
.00001667 per GB seconds after
