Billing and Pricing

Question 1

What is Capex?

Answer 1

Capital expenditure

Pay up front - fixed sunk cost

Question 2

What is Opex?

Answer 2

Operation expenditure

Pay for what you use - variable

Question 3

What are the different pricing policies?

Answer 3

Pay as you go
Pay less when you reserve
Pay even less per unit by using more
Pay even less as AWS grows
Custom pricing

Question 4

What are the fundamental drivers of cost with AWS?

Answer 4

Compute
Storage
Data outbound

Question 5

Which services are free?

Answer 5

Amazon VPC
Elastic Beanstalk
CloudFormation
IAM
Autoscaling
Opsworks
Consolidated billing

Question 6

What determines EC2 pricing?

Answer 6

Clock hours of server time
Instance type
Pricing model
Number of instances
Load balancing
Detailed monitoring
Autoscaling
Elastic IP addresses
Operating systems and software packages

Question 7

What are the EC2 pricing models?

Answer 7

On demand - fixed rate by hour/second
Reserved - capacity reservation with discount for a contract of 1 or 3 years
Spot - bid whatever price you want for instance capacity, flexible start and end times
Dedicated hosts - physical EC2 servers

Question 8

What determines price for lamda?

Answer 8

Request pricing - free tier = 1 million requests
Duration pricing - 400000 GB seconds per month free
Additional charges - incur if other AWS services or transfers of data

Question 9

What determines the price of EBS?

Answer 9

Volumes (per GB)
Snapshots (per GB)
Data transfer

Question 10

What determines price of S3?

Answer 10

Storage class (Standard or IA or 1 AZ IA etc)
Storage
Requests (GET, PUT, COPY)
Data transfer

Question 11

What determines price for glacier?

Answer 11

Storage

Data retrieval times (Expedited, standard, bulk)

Question 12

What determines the price for snowball?

Answer 12

Service per job
Daily charge
Data transfer - free to S3 but out of is not

Question 13

What determines the price for RDS?

Answer 13

Clock hours of server time
Database characteristics
Database purchase type
Number of database instances
Provisioned storage
Additional storage
Requests
Deployment type
Data transfer

Question 14

What determines the price for DynamoDB?

Answer 14

Provisioned throughput (write)
Provisioned throughput (read)
Indexed data storage

Question 15

What determines price for cloudfront?

Answer 15

Traffic distribution
Requests
Data transfer out

Question 16

What is AWS Budgets?

Answer 16

Set custom budgets that alert you when your costs or usage exceed your budget
Used to budget before costs have been incurred

Question 17

What is AWS cost explorer?

Answer 17

Lets you visualise, understand and manage your AWS costs and usage over time
Used to explore costs after they have been incurred

Question 18

What are the different AWS support plans?

Answer 18

Basic
Developer
Business
Enterprise

Question 19

What are tags?

Answer 19

Key value pairs attached to AWS resources
Metadata
Tags can sometimes be inherited

Question 20

What are resource groups?

Answer 20

Used to apply automation
Include info:
Region
Name
Employee ID
Department

Question 21

What specific information can tags contain?

Answer 21

EC2 - public and private IP
ELB - port configurations
RDS - database engine

Question 22

What is tag editor?

Answer 22

Find resources and edit tags

Global service

Question 23

What is AWS organisations?

Answer 23

an account management service that enables you to consolidate multiple AWS accounts into an organisation unit that you create and centrally manage

Question 24

What are the two features of AWS organisations?

Answer 24

Consolidated billing

All features

Question 25

How consolidated billing works?

Answer 25

Paying account is independent - cannot access resources of the other accounts All linked accounts are independent Limit of 20 linked accounts

Question 26

What are the advantages of consolidated billing?

Answer 26

one bill per AWS account Very easy to track charges and allocate costs Volume pricing discount

Question 27

What are the best practises of AWS organisations?

Answer 27

Always enable multi-factor authentication on root account Always use a strong and complex password on root account Paying account should be used for billing purposes only, do not deploy resources into the paying account

Question 28

What is CloudTrail?

Answer 28

Monitors API calls in the AWS platform | For auditing

Question 29

How to use Cloudtrail with AWS organisations?

Answer 29

Per AWS account and is enabled per region | Can consolidate logs using an S3 bucket

Question 30

What are AWS quick starts?

Answer 30

Templates created by solution architects using blueprints of 3rd party application services Deploy environments quickly using cloudformation templates built by AWS solutions architects who are experts in that particular technology

Question 31

What is the AWS landing zone?

Answer 31

Set up secure multi account aws environment | based on best practises

Question 32

What are the different types of AWS partners?

Answer 32

Consulting - service based | Technology - hardware, connectivity services

Question 33

What are the different levels of consulting partners?

Answer 33

Select Advanced Premier

Question 34

What are the different AWS calculators?

Answer 34

AWS simple monthly calculator - static S3 website | AWS total cost of ownership calculator - servers on prem vs on cloud, give to clevel execs to make a business case

Question 35

What does free tier include?

Answer 35

EC2 - 750 hours per month of t2.micro/t3.micro instance usage S3 - 5GB of storage, 20000 get requests and 20000 put requests RDS 750 hours of t2.micro database usage for MySQL, PostgreSQL etc, 20GB of general purpose SSD database storage and 20GB of storage for database backup and DB snapshots CloudFront - 50GB data transfer out and 2mill HTTP and HTTPS requests each month

Question 36

What are the pricing policy principles and best practises?

Answer 36

Understand the fundamentals of pricing - where are costs? Start early with cost optimisation Maximise the power of flexibility - services are priced independently and transparently, pay as you go Use the right pricing model for the job