Beginner’s Guide to Billing and Pricing — AWS Cloud Practitioner Study Guide

AWS Pricing

3 Pricing Models

1. Pay as you go: Pay for how much use without any contracts
2. Save when you reserve: You can schedule when you want to use an instance.
3. Pay less by using more: You get discounts automatically based on volume

CapEx vs OpEx

Capital Expenditure (CapEx): Pay upfront. It’s a fixed, sunk cost

Operational Expenditure (OpEx): Pay for what you use

• Ex. Utility billing like electricity, gas, water, etc

3 Pricing Concepts

• Compute: Charged by hour/second, varies by instance type
• Storage: Charged typically per GB
• Data Transfer: Charged typically per GB, Outbound is aggregated and charged, Inbound has no charge (with some exceptions)

Where to Find Pricing Information on AWS Services

• AWS Simply Monthly Calculator
• AWS Services product pages
• AWS Pricing API

How Amazon Lambda Pricing Works

• Charged by number of requests for your function and time it takes to run them
• Free for first 1 million requests and up to 3.2 million seconds of compute time per month
• 1 or 3 year term available via Compute Savings Plan

How Amazon EC2 Pricing Works

On-Demand Instances

• Charged by hour/second
• Great for short-term, unpredictable workloads

Reserved Instances

• Discount for 1–3 year commitments
• Great for applications with steady state usage

Dedicated Hosts

• Physical server dedicated to you
• Great for applications with specific compliance requirements

Spot Instances

• Spare AWS capacity for up to 90% discount
• Great for applications with flexible start and end times and urgent computing needs for large amount of capacity

Amazon EC2 Savings Plans

• Reduce your compute costs by committing to a consistent amount of compute usage for a 1 or 3 year term. Savings of up to 66% over On-Demand costs

How Amazon S3 Pricing Works

Storage

• Pay for how much you use
• Rate is based on object’s size, storage class, and how long it’s stored

Requests and Data Retrievals

• Pay for requests made to the objects/buckets

Data Transfer

• Pay for data that you transfer into and out of Amazon S3
• No cost to transfer data between different S3 buckets or from S3 to other services within same region
• No cost for data transferred into Amazon S3 from the internet or out to Amazon CloudFront
• No cost for data transferred out to an Amazon EC2 instance in the same AWS Region as the Amazon S3 bucket

Management and Replication

• Pay for storage management features that you have enabled on your account’s Amazon S3 buckets like Amazon S3 inventory, analytics, and object tagging

How Amazon EBS Pricing Works

Volumes

• Charged by hour/second
• Varies by volume type

Snapshots

• Charged by space consumed in Amazon S3
• Charged for volume copied across regions

Data Transfer

• Inbound data transfer is free
• Outbound data transfer charges are tiered

AWS Services with No Charge

• Amazon VPC
• Elastic Beanstalk
• Auto Scaling
• AWS CloudFormation
• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

AWS Free Tier

Definition: Gain free hands-on experience on the AWS platform by signing up for an AWS account. Free for 12 months.

Billing Alarm

Definition: Automatically alerts you when a certain amount of AWS spend has been reached

• Notifications are sent via email when the bill hits a specified money amount
• Billing alarm uses an SNS topic aka an email notification
• Go to CloudWatch to set up automatic billing notifications

AWS Pricing Tools

5 Pricing Tools

AWS Budgets

Definition: Set custom budgets that alerts you when your costs exceed your budgeted amount

AWS Simple Monthly Calculator

• Estimate your monthly bill
• Per-service cost breakdown
• Aggregate monthly estimate
• Provides common customer examples

AWS Cost Explorer

Definition: Analyze usage and cost over time, as well as forecast

• Use tags like “project: secretProject” to see what resources are being used by a project

AWS Cost and Usage Report

Definition: Comprehensive information on cost and usage

• Lists usage for each service category used by an account and its IAM users

AWS Pricing Calculator

Definition: Get an estimate for your specific use cases. The estimate can be save and shared with your team.

AWS Organizations

Definition: Manage multiple AWS accounts from a central location

• Provides consolidate billing so you receive a single bill for all AWS accounts in the organization. This allows you to share bulk discount pricing.

How to get Support or Information related to Billing

• Cost Explorer
• Cost and Usage Report
• QuickSight
• Open a billing support case
• Work with you Technical Account Manager if you company has Enterprise Support Plan

AWS Support Plans

4 AWS Support Plans

1. Basic: Free customer service, support forums, documentation, limited Trust Advisor checks
2. Developer: Business hour access for 1 person with unlimited cases, best practice guidance, building block architecture support
3. Business: 24x7 service for unlimited people and support cases, use case guidance, 3rd party software support, All Trusted Advisor checks
4. Enterprise: Assigned Technical Account Manager (TAM), white glove case-routing, infrastructure event management

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