4.1 Economics of the Cloud

Question 1

Provide two terms of financing projects

Answer 1

• Capitalised Expenditure (CapEx) - When building a data center, an organisation invests in upfront costs for the building, servers, and supporting equipment. This type of expense to attain a fixed asset is referred to as CapEx.
• Operating Expenditure (OpEx) - The regular day to day expenses of a business are considered operating Expenditure or OpEx. After the initial build of a data center, ongoing connectivity, utility and maintainence costs would be considered OpEx.

Question 2

What is the ‘AWS Cost Explorer’?

Answer 2

• It is a UI for exploring AWS costs. It’s features include:
  Breakdowns occurring to service or cost tag, provides predictions for next 3 months of costs, gives recommendations for cost optimisation, can be accessed via an api.

Question 3

What are ‘AWS Budgets’?

Answer 3

• A component that utilises data from AWS Cost Explorer to plan and track your usage across AWS services.

Question 4

Provide two examples of Cost Planning Tools.

Answer 4

AWS TCO Calculator - Enables an organisation to determine what could be saved leveraging cloud infrastructure.

AWS Simple Monthly Calculator - Enables an organisation to calculate the cost of running a specific AWS infrastructure.

Question 5

What is a Cost Allocation Report?

Answer 5

A Report that includes costs grouped by ‘Active Tags’.

Question 6

How does ‘AWS Organisation’ help organise costs in AWS?

Answer 6

It allows you to manage multiple accounts under a single master account.
It provides organisations with the ability to leverage ‘Consolidated Billing’ for all accounts.
Enables organisations to centralise logging and security standards across accounts.