AWS Billing and Pricing

AWS Budgets

AWS Budgets is a service that helps you plan service usage, service costs, and instance reservations.

Note: First two budgets are free of charge.

Each budget is $0.02 per day with a 20,000 budget limit.

Key Points:

• AWS Budgets give you the ability to setup alerts if you exceed or are approaching your defined budget

• Types of budgets:

1. Cost
2. Usage
3. Reservation

• Budgets can be tracked at the monthly, quarterly, or yearly levels with customizable start and end dates.
• Alerts support EC2, RDS, Redshift, and ElastiCache reservations
• Your budget can be based on a fixed cost or you can plan your upfront cost based on your chosen level.
• Budgets can easily be managed from the AWS Budgets dashboard or via the Budgets API
• You can get notified by providing an email or chatbot and give a threshold for how close to the current or forecasted budget you would like to spend before being alerted.

AWS Cost and Usage Report

The AWS Cost and Usage Reports tracks your AWS usage and provides estimated charges associated with your account.

Key Points:

• You can generate a detailed spreadsheet, enabling you to better analyze and understand your AWS costs.
• The reports are placed in to S3
• You can use Athena to turn the report into a queryable database.
• You can use QuickSight to visualize your billing data as graphs.

Athena: Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL.

QuickSight: Amazon QuickSight is a fast, cloud-powered business intelligence service that makes it easy to deliver insights to everyone in your organization.

Consolidated Billing

Consolidated billing allows you to have one bill for all of your accounts.

Key Points:

• You can consolidate your billing and payment methods across multiple AWS accounts into one bill.
• For billing, AWS treats all accounts in an organization as if they were one account.
• You can designate one master account that pays the charges of all the other member accounts.
• There is no extra cost to use consolidated billing.
• You can use AWS Cost Explorer to visualize usage for consolidated billing.

Cost Explorer

AWS Cost Explorer lets you visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time.

Key Points:

• Costs for multiple AWS accounts within an AWS Organization will be consolidated in a master account.
• You can use default reports to help gain insight into your cost rivers and usage trends.
• You can use forecasting to get an idea of future costs.
• You can choose to view your data at a monthly or daily level of granularity.
• You can use filter and grouping functionalities to dig deeper into your data.

TCO Calculator

The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) allows you to estimate how much you would save moving to AWS from on-premise.

Key Points:

• It provides you with a detailed set of reports that can be used in executive presentations.
• The tool is built on underlying calculation models that generate fair assessments of value that you can achieve given the data provided.
• Helps reduce the need to invest in large capital expenditures.
• The tool is for approximation purposes only.

AWS Trusted Advisor

AWS Trusted Advisor advises you on security, saving money, performance, service limits, and fault tolerance

Key Points:

• All accounts receive 7 free Trusted Advisor Checks. Business and Enterprise accounts you receive all Trusted Advisor Checks.

The 5 areas Trusted Advisor will check you on:

1. Cost Optimization
2. Performance
3. Security
4. Fault Tolerance
5. Service Limits

Each category has the potential to check many different services.

Most common checks in each category:

Cost Optimization

• Idle Load Balancers
• Unassociated Elastic IP Addresses

Performance

• High Utilization Amazon EC2 Instances

Security

• MFA on Root Account
• IAM Access Key Rotation

Fault Tolerance

• Amazon RDS Backups

Service Limits

• VPC

For the complete list you can visit this page.

AWS Free Services

Certain AWS services are free, but the resources they setup may cost you.

Free services:

• Identity Access Management (IAM)
• Amazon VPC
• Organizations & Consolidated Billing
• AWS Cost Explorer

Free Services with resources that cost money:

• Auto Scaling
• Cloud Formation
• Elastic Beanstalk
• Opsworks
• Amplify
• AppSync
• CodeStar

AWS Landing Zone

AWS Landing Zone helps Enterprises quickly set-up a secure, AWS multi-account.

Key Points:

• Set up through AWS Account Vending Machine (AVM)

AVM allows customers to create new AWS accounts in Organizational Units (OUs) preconfigured with an account security baseline, and a predefined network.

• AVM automatically provisions and configures new accounts via AWS Service Catalog
• Uses Single Sign-on (SSO) for managing and accessing accounts
• The environment is customizable to allow customers to implement their own account baselines through a Landing Zone configuration and update pipeline

The AWS Landing Zone solution includes four accounts:

1. AWS Organization account
2. Shared Services account
3. Log Archive account
4. Security account

AWS Quick Starts

AWS Quick Starts are prebuilt templates by AWS and AWS Partners to help you deploy popular stacks on AWS.

Key Points:

• It can reduce hundreds of manual procedures into a few steps.

A Quick Start is composed of 3 parts:

1. A reference architecture for the deployment
2. AWS CloudFormation templates that automate and configure the deployment
3. A deployment guide explaining the architecture and implementation in detail

• Most Quick Start reference deployments enable you to spin up a fully functional architecture in less than an hour.

AWS Support Plans

AWS Support offers a range of plans that provide access to tools and expertise that support the success and operational health of your AWS solutions.

Key Points:

There are 4 support plans available.

1. Basic Plan - Free
   • Every AWS account has access to this free basic plan.
   • It provides Email Support for Billing and Accounts.
2. Developer Plan- $20 USD month
   • Great for learning how to use a lot of AWS services or for help configuring things while learning.
   • Provides tech support via email -24hrs until reply
   • Provides general support and help if your system is impaired
   • Does not provide help with 3rd party products
3. Business Plan- $100 USD month
   • Provides tech support via email -24hrs until reply
   • Provides tech support via chat and phone 24 hours a day. Often can reach a support engineer within 10-15 minutes.
   • Receive all Trusted Advisor Checks
   • Will try to provide help with 3rd party products
4. Enterprise Plan- $15,000 USD month
   • All of the services of the other plans included with this one
   • Will respond within 15 minutes if there is a business critical system down
   • Your account is given a Personal Concierge
   • Your account is given a Technical Account Manager (TAM)

A TAM is a designated point of contact to all necessary AWS expertise

A Personal Concierge(Support Concierge) is a dedicated team of enterprise account specialist to help with billing and account subjects.

AWS Resource Groups and Tagging

Key Points:

• Tags are words or phrases that act as metadata for organizing your AWS resources
• Resource groups are a collection of resources that share one or more tags
• Both help you organize and consolidate information based on your project and the resources that you use.

Resource Groups can display details about a group based on:

• Metrics
• Alarms

• Configuration Settings

• At any time you can modify the settings of your resource groups to change what resources appear

AWS Marketplace

AWS Marketplace is a curated digital catalogue with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors.

Key Points:

• You can easily find, buy, test, and deploy software that already runs on AWS
• The product can be free to use or can have an associated charge. The charge becomes part of your AWS bill, and once you pay, AWS Marketplace pays the provider
• The sales channel for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Consulting Partners allows you to sell your solutions to other AWS customers

Products can be offered as:

• Amazon Machine Images (AMIs)
• AWS CloudFormation templates
• Software as a service (SaaS) offerings
• AWS WAF rules

This material can be found on the AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam. For more study material for the exam check out ExamPro's AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner 2020 course.