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)
