aws_cloud_practitioner
Pricing and Support
AWS Free Tier
The AWS Free Tier enables you to begin using certain services without having to worry about incurring costs for the specified period.
Three types of offers are available:
- Always Free
- 12 Months Free
- Trials
Always free
These offers do not expire and are available to all AWS customers.
Examples:
- AWS Lambda allows 1 million free requests and up to 3.2 million seconds of compute time per month.
- Amazon DynamoDB allows 25 GB of free storage per month.
12 Months Free
These offers are free for 12 months following your initial sign-up date to AWS.
Examples:
- specific amounts of Amazon S3 Standard Storage,
- thresholds for monthly hours of Amazon EC2 compute time,
- amounts of Amazon CloudFront data transfer out.
Trials
Short-term free trial offers start from the date you activate a particular service.
Examples:
- Amazon Inspector offers a 90-day free trial.
- Amazon Lightsail offers 750 free hours of usage over a 30-day period.
How AWS Pricing Works
AWS offers a range of cloud computing services with pay-as-you-go pricing.
Categories:
- Pay for what you use. For each service, you pay for exactly the amount of resources that you actually use, without requiring long-term contracts or complex licensing.
- Pay less when you reserve. Some services offer reservation options that provide a significant discount compared to On-Demand Instance pricing.
- Pay less with volume-based discounts when you use more. Some services offer tiered pricing, so the per-unit cost is incrementally lower with increased usage.
AWS Pricing Calculator
The AWS Pricing Calculator lets you explore AWS services and create an estimate for the cost of your use cases on AWS.
You can organize your AWS estimates by groups that you define. A group can reflect how your company is organized, such as providing estimates by cost center.
AWS Pricing Examples
AWS Lambda Pricing
- You are charged based on the number of requests for your functions and the time that it takes for them to run.
- 1 million free requests and up to 3.2 million seconds of compute time per month.
You can save on AWS Lambda costs by signing up for a Compute Savings Plan. A Compute Savings Plan offers lower compute costs in exchange for committing to a consistent amount of usage over a 1-year or 3-year term. This is an example of paying less when you reserve.
AWS EC2 Pricing
- You pay for only the compute time that you use while your instances are running.
- For some workloads, you can significantly reduce Amazon EC2 costs by using Spot Instances. For example, suppose that you are running a batch processing job that is able to withstand interruptions.
- You can find additional cost savings for Amazon EC2 by considering Savings Plans and Reserved Instances.
AWS S3 Pricing
Consider the following cost components.
1. Storage
You pay for only the storage that you use. You are charged based on:
- the objects’ sizes
- storage classes
- how long you have stored each object during the month.
2. Request and data retrievals
You pay for requests made to your Amazon S3 objects and buckets.
3. Data transfer
There is no cost to transfer data between different Amazon S3 buckets or from Amazon S3 to other services within the same AWS Region.
You pay for data that you transfer into and out of Amazon S3, with a few exceptions.
There is no cost for data transferred into Amazon S3 from the internet or out to Amazon CloudFront.
There is also no cost for data transferred out to an Amazon EC2 instance in the same AWS Region as the Amazon S3 bucket.
4. Management and replication
You pay for the storage management features that you have enabled on your account’s Amazon S3 buckets. These features include Amazon S3 inventory, analytics, and object tagging.
For each Region, charges are based on the following factors:
- The number of requests to add or copy objects into a bucket
- The number of requests to retrieve objects from a bucket
- The amount of storage space used.
Billing Dashboards
Use the AWS Billing & Cost Management dashboard to pay your AWS bill, monitor your usage, and analyze and control your costs.
And more:
- Compare your current month-to-date balance with the previous month, and get a forecast of the next month based on current usage.
- View month-to-date spend by service.
- View Free Tier usage by service.
- Access Cost Explorer and create budgets.
- Purchase and manage Savings Plans.
- Publish AWS Cost and Usage Reports.
Consolidated Billing
The consolidated billing feature of AWS Organizations enables you to receive a single bill for all AWS accounts in your organization.
The default maximum number of accounts allowed for an organization is 4, but you can contact AWS Support to increase your quota, if needed.
A benefit of consolidated billing is the ability to share bulk discount pricing, Savings Plans, and Reserved Instances across the accounts in your organization.
AWS Budgets
In AWS Budgets, you can create budgets to plan your service usage, service costs, and instance reservations.
The information in AWS Budgets updates three times a day.
In AWS Budgets, you can also set custom alerts when your usage exceeds (or is forecasted to exceed) the budgeted amount.
AWS Cost Explorer
AWS Cost Explorer is a tool that enables you to visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time.
AWS Cost Explorer includes a default report of the costs and usage for your top five cost-accruing AWS services and it gives you 12 months of historical data, so you can track your spending over time.
AWS Support Plans
AWS offers four different Support plans to help you troubleshoot issues, lower costs, and efficiently use AWS services.
In general, for pricing, the Developer plan has the lowest cost, the Business and Enterprise On-Ramp plans are in the middle, and the Enterprise plan has the highest cost.
1. Basic
Basic Support is free for all AWS customers. It includes access to whitepapers, documentation, and support communities.
With Basic Support, you have access to a limited selection of AWS Trusted Advisor checks.
Additionally, you can use the AWS Personal Health Dashboard, a tool that provides alerts and remediation guidance when AWS is experiencing events that may affect you.
2. Developer
Features:
- Best practice guidance
- Client-side diagnostic tools
- Building-block architecture support, which consists of guidance for how to use AWS offerings, features, and services together.
You can email customer support directly with a 24 hour response time on any questions you have. And responses of less than 12 hours in case your systems are impaired.
3. Business
Features:
- Use-case guidance to identify AWS offerings, features, and services that can best support your specific needs
- All AWS Trusted Advisor checks
- Limited support for third-party software, such as common operating systems and application stack components.
You are given direct phone access to AWS support team that has a four hour response SLA. Access to infrastructure event management.
4 Enterprise
Enterprise On-Ramp Support
Features:
- A pool of Technical Account Managers to provide proactive guidance and coordinate access to programs and AWS experts
- A Cost Optimization workshop (one per year)
- A Concierge support team for billing and account assistance
- Tools to monitor costs and performance through Trusted Advisor and Health API/Dashboard
Enterprise Support
Features:
- Operations Reviews and tools to monitor health
- Training and Game Days to drive innovation
- Consultative review and architecture guidance
- Infrastructure Event Management support
- Support automation workflows
- 15 minutes or less response time for business-critical issues
Technical Account Manager
The Enterprise On-Ramp and Enterprise Support plans include access to a Technical Account Manager (TAM).
The TAM is your primary point of contact at AWS.
AWS Marketplace
AWS Marketplace is a digital catalog that includes thousands of software listings from independent software vendors. AWS Marketplace offers products in several categories.
Notes
- S3 us free for 12 months for up to five gigs of storage.
- Amazon Lightsail is a service that enables you to run virtual private servers.
- Pay less when you reserve Example: suppose that your company is using Amazon EC2 instances for a workload that needs to run continuously. You might choose to run this workload on Amazon EC2 Instance Savings Plans, because the plan allows you to save up to 72% over the equivalent On-Demand Instance capacity.
- Pay less with volume-based discounts when you use more Example: The more Amazon S3 storage space you use, the less you pay for it per GB.
- AWS Organizations is a service that enables you to manage multiple AWS accounts from a central location. AWS Organizations also provides the option for consolidated billing.
- Consolidated billing enables you to share volume pricing discounts across accounts.
- In Amazon S3, after customers have transferred 10 TB of data in a month, they pay a lower per-GB transfer price for the next 40 TB of data transferred.
- Developer, Business, Enterprise On-Ramp, and Enterprise Support - These Support plans have pay-by-the-month pricing and require no long-term contracts.
- Only the Business, Enterprise On-Ramp, and Enterprise Support plans include all AWS Trusted Advisor checks. Of these three Support plans, the Business Support plan has a lower cost.