AWS Billing and Pricing Flashcards

Question

What is Amazon DynamoDB Provisioned capacity mode?

Answer 1

- Specify number of reads and writes per second - Can use Auto Scaling - Good for predictable workloads - Consistent traffic or gradual changes

Answer 2

- Basic – billing and account support only (access to forums only). - Developer – business hours support via email. - Business – 24×7 email, chat, and phone support. - Enterprise – 24×7 email, chat, and phone support.

Answer 3

Developer allows one person to open unlimited cases. Business and Enterprise allow unlimited contacts to open unlimited cases. Enterprise support comes with a Technical Account Manager (TAM).

Answer 4

Tags are key / value pairs that can be attached to AWS resources. Tags contain metadata (data about data). Tags can sometimes be inherited – e.g. resources created by Auto Scaling, CloudFormation or Elastic Beanstalk.

Answer 5

Resource groups make it easy to group resources using the tags that are assigned to them. You can group resources that share one or more tags. Resource groups contain general information, such as: - Region. - Name. - Health Checks. And specific information, such as: - Public & private IP addresses (for EC2). - Port configurations (for ELB). - Database engine (for RDS).

Answer 6

AWS organizations allows you to consolidate multiple AWS accounts into an organization that you create and centrally manage. Includes root accounts and organizational units.

Answer 7

Available in two feature sets: - Consolidated Billing. - All features.

Answer 8

Policies are applied to root accounts or OUs.

Answer 9

Consolidated billing includes: Paying Account – independent and cannot access resources of other accounts. Linked Accounts – all linked accounts are independent.

Answer 10

Consolidated billing has the following benefits: - One bill – You get one bill for multiple accounts. - Easy tracking – You can track the charges across multiple accounts and download the combined cost and usage data. - Combined usage – You can combine the usage across all accounts in the organization to share the volume pricing discounts and Reserved Instance discounts. This can result in a lower charge for your project, department, or company than with individual standalone accounts. - No extra fee – Consolidated billing is offered at no additional cost.

Answer 11

Limit of 20 linked accounts (by default).

Answer 12

- One bill for multiple AWS accounts. - Easy to track charges and allocate costs. - Volume pricing discounts can be applied to resources. - Billing alerts enabled on the Paying account include data for all Linked accounts (or can be created per Linked account). - Consolidated billing allows you to get volume discounts on all your accounts. - Unused reserved instances (RIs) for EC2 are applied across the group. - CloudTrail is on a per account basis and per region basis but can be aggregated into a single bucket in the paying account.

Answer 13

Best practices: - Always enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) on the root account. - Always use a strong and complex password on the root account. - The Paying account should be used for billing purposes only. Do not deploy resources into the Paying account.

Answer 14

Quick Starts are built by AWS architects and partners to help you deploy popular solutions on AWS, based on AWS best practices for security and high availability. These reference deployments implement key technologies automatically on the AWS Cloud, often with a single click and in less than an hour. Leverages CloudFormation. AWS Cost Calculators and Tools - AWS Cost Explorer – enables you to visualize your usage patterns over time and to identify your underlying cost drivers. - AWS Pricing Calculator – create cost estimates to suit your AWS use cases

Answer 15

The AWS Cost Explorer is a free tool that allows you to view charts of your costs. You can view cost data for the past 13 months and forecast how much you are likely to spend over the next three months. Cost Explorer can be used to discover patterns in how much you spend on AWS resources over time and to identify cost problem areas.

Answer 16

Cost Explorer can help you to identify service usage statistics such as: - Which services you use the most. - View metrics for which AZ has the most traffic. - Which linked account is used the most.

Answer 17

AWS Pricing Calculator is a web-based service that you can use to create cost estimates to suit your AWS use cases. AWS Pricing Calculator is useful both for people who have never used AWS and for those who want to reorganize or expand their usage. AWS Pricing Calculator allows you to explore AWS services based on your use cases and create a cost estimate.

Answer 18

Publish AWS billing reports to an Amazon S3 bucket. Reports break down costs by: - Hour, day, month, product, product resource, tags. Can update the report up to three times a day. Create, retrieve, and delete your reports using the AWS CUR API Reference.

Answer 19

Query the prices of AWS services. Price List Service API (AKA the Query API) – query with JSON. AWS Price List API (AKA the Bulk API) – query with HTML. Alerts via Amazon SNS when prices change.

Answer 20

Used to track cost, usage, or coverage and utilization for your Reserved Instances and Savings Plans, across multiple dimensions, such as service, or Cost Categories. Alerting through event-driven alert notifications for when actual or forecasted cost or usage exceeds your budget limit, or when your RI and Savings Plans’ coverage or utilization drops below your threshold. Create annual, quarterly, monthly, or even daily budgets depending on your business needs.