Billing and Pricing

Question 1

EC2 Pricing Types

Answer 1

On-Demand, Reserved, Spot, Dedicated

Question 2

EC2 Pricing - On-Demand

Answer 2

Least Commitment
Low $ and flexible - pay per hour/min
Use: short-term, spiky, unpredictable, first-time apps, when your workloads cannot be interrupted

Question 3

EC2 Pricing - RIs

Answer 3

Reserved Instances
Best Long-term value - Up to 75% off
Payment terms: 1y or 3y
Reduced pricing based on: Term x Class Offering x Payment Option
Use: steady state / predictable usage
Can resell unused RIs - RI Marketplace
Class Offerings: Standard (75% off, can’t change RI attributes), Convertible (54% off, can change RI attributes if >= in value), Scheduled (reserve instances for specific time periods)

Question 4

EC2 Pricing - Spot

Answer 4

Biggest Savings - up to 90% off
Request spare computing capacity
Flexible start and end times
Use: non-critical background jobs that can handle interruptions
AWS Batch - easy / convenient way to use Spot

Question 5

EC2 Pricing - Dedicated

Answer 5

Most Expensive
Dedicated servers
Can be on-demand or reserved (up to 70% off)
Use: when you need a guarantee of isolate hardware

Question 6

AWS Free Services

Answer 6

IAM and Amazon VPC are free
Auto Scaling, Cloud Formation, Elastic Beanstalk - services themselves are free, but they can provision services that are not

Question 7

AWS Support Plans - types

Answer 7

Basic, Developer, Business, Enterprise

Question 8

Basic Support Plan

Answer 8

Free
7 Trusted Advisor Checks
Email Support only
For Billing and Account

Question 9

Developer Support Plan

Answer 9

$20/mo
7 Trusted Advisor Checks
Tech support via Email - ~24h reply
No 3rd party support
General guidance <24h
System Impaired <12h

Question 10

Business Support Plan

Answer 10

$100/mo
All Trusted Advisor Checks
Tech support via Email ~24h reply
Tech support via Chat, Phone 24/7 (3rd party)
General guidance <24h
System Impaired <12h
Production System Impaired <4h
Production System Down <1h

Question 11

Enterprise Support Plan

Answer 11

$15,000/mo
All Trusted Advisor Checks
Tech support via Email ~24h reply
Tech support via Chat, Phone 24/7 (3rd party)
General guidance <24h
System Impaired <12h
Production System Impaired <4h
Production System Down <1h
Business-Critical System Down <15m
2 Dedicated people - Personal Concierge and TAM (Technical Account Mgr)

Question 12

AWS Marketplace

Answer 12

Digital catalogue w/thousands of software listings from ISVs (independent software vendors)
Products can be free or have a charge
The sales channel for ISVs lets you sell your solutions

Question 13

AWS Marketplace Product Types

Answer 13

AMIs - Amazon Machine Images
AWS CloudFormation templates
SaaS - Software as a Service offerings
Web ACL (Access Control Lists)
AWS WAF rules (web application firewall)

Question 14

AWS Trusted Advisor

Answer 14

Automated checklist of best practices

Advises on Cost Optimization, Performance, Security, Fault Tolerance, Service Limits

Question 15

Trusted Advisor - Cost Optimization

Answer 15

Most common:

Get rid of idle Load Balancers and Unassociated Elastic IP Addresses

Question 16

Trusted Advisor - Performance

Answer 16

Most common:

EC2 instances - may recommend you use a larger instance to get better performance

Question 17

Trusted Advisor - Security

Answer 17

Most common:
Add MFA on Root Account
IAM Access Key Rotation - keys used by users

Question 18

Trusted Advisor - Fault Tolerance

Answer 18

Most common:

Amazon RDS Backups - making sure you have backups in place

Question 19

Trusted Advisor - Service Limits

Answer 19

Most common:

VPC - when to get a service limit increase

Question 20

Consolidated Billing

Answer 20

One bill for all of your accounts.
No additional cost.
Use Cost Explorer to visualize usage for consolidated billing
Has volume discounts

Question 21

AWS Cost Explorer

Answer 21

Lets you visualize and manage your costs/usage over time.

Uses forecasting, monthly or daily views, filtering and grouping

Question 22

AWS Budgets

Answer 22

Create Cost, Usage, or Instance Reservation Budgets
Highly customizable billing alarms
1st 2 are free, otherwise ea budget is $0.02/day ($0.60/mo) with a 20,000 budget limit
Alerts support EC2, RDS, Redshift, and ElastiCache reservations
Can be notified by email or Chatbot

Question 23

TCO Calculator

Answer 23

Total Cost of Ownership Calculator
Allows you to estimate how much you would save when moving to AWS from on-prem
Provides detailed reports, can be used in presentations

Question 24

AWS Landing Zone

Answer 24

Helps Enterprises quickly set up a secure and scalable AWS multi-account architecture
Uses AWS AVM (account vending machine)

Question 25

AWS AVM

Answer 25

Account Vending Machine
Automatically provisions and configures new accounts via Service Catalog Template
Uses SSO (single sign-on) for managing and accessing accounts

Question 26

Tags

Answer 26

Words / phrases
Act as metadata for organizing resources
When creating instances inside of services, can add tags - key/value
Manage Tags - search by tag, edit tags

Question 27

Resource Groups

Answer 27

Collection of resources that share 1 or more tags
Can display details about a group of resources based on Metrics, Alarms, Config Settings
Can modify your Resource group settings to change what resources appear

Question 28

AWS QuickStart

Answer 28

Prebuilt templates to help you deploy popular stacks on AWS
3 parts - (1. reference architecture for the deployment, (2. AWS CloudFormation templates that automate and configure the deployment, (3. Deployment guide explaining the architecture and implementation
Usually up in < 1h

Question 29

AWS Cost and Usage Report

Answer 29

Generate a detailed spreadsheet to better analyze your AWS costs
Places reports into S3 w/in 24h
Can use Athena to turn into a queryable db, can use QuickSight to visualize as graphs