Module 8 Pricing and Support
- Describe AWS pricing and support models.
- Describe the AWS Free Tier.
- Describe key benefits of AWS Organizations and consolidated billing.
- Explain the benefits of AWS Budgets.
- Explain the benefits of AWS Cost Explorer.
- Explain the primary benefits of the AWS Pricing Calculator.
- Distinguish between the various AWS Support Plans.
- Describe the benefits of AWS Marketplace.
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.
* Always Free
* 12 Months Free
* Trials
For each free tier offer, make sure to review the specific details about exactly which resource types are included.
. Let's take AWS Lambda, our serverless compute option. As of March 2020, it allows for one million free invocations per month. That means if you stay under one million invocations, it's always free. This Free Tier never expires. Another example is S3, our object store service. It's free for 12 months for up to five gigs of storage. Thereafter, you'll incur a cost. Great for trying out a static website on S3, I might say. And the last example is Lightsail where you can deploy ready-made application stacks. We offer a one month trial of up to 750 hours of usage.
Other services that qualify under the free tier are SageMaker, Comprehend Medical, DynamoDB, SNS, Cognito, and so much more. If you want to see the full list of 60 or so services,
12 Months Free
These offers are free for 12 months following your initial sign-up date to AWS.
Examples include specific amounts of Amazon S3 Standard Storage, thresholds for monthly hours of Amazon EC2 compute time, and amounts of Amazon CloudFront data transfer out.
Trials
Short-term free trial offers start from the date you activate a particular service. The length of each trial might vary by number of days or the amount of usage in the service.
For example, Amazon Inspector offers a 90-day free trial. Amazon Lightsail (a service that enables you to run virtual private servers) offers 750 free hours of usage over a 30-day period.
Question
The AWS Free Tier includes offers that are available to new AWS customers for a certain period of time following their AWS sign-up date. What is the duration of this period?
-AWS pricing concepts
How AWS pricing works
AWS offers a range of cloud computing services with pay-as-you-go pricing.
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.
For 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.
Some services offer tiered pricing, so the per-unit cost is incrementally lower with increased usage.
For example, the more Amazon S3 storage space you use, the less you pay for it per GB.AWS Pricing Calculator
EC2 Pricing
Follows the AWS pay-as-you-go pricing model
No long-term commitments or upfront payments are needed
When using on-demand Linux instance you are charged per seconds based on hourly rates.
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.
When you have created an estimate, you can save it and generate a link to share it with others.
For AWS Lambda, you are charged based on the number of requests for your functions and the time that it takes for them to run.
AWS Lambda allows 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.
Billing Dashboard
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.
In an earlier module, you learned about AWS Organizations, a service that enables you to manage multiple AWS accounts from a central location. AWS Organizations also provides the option for consolidated billing.
The consolidated billing feature of AWS Organizations enables you to receive a single bill for all AWS accounts in your organization. By consolidating, you can easily track the combined costs of all the linked 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.
On your monthly bill, you can review itemized charges incurred by each account. This enables you to have greater transparency into your organization’s accounts while still maintaining the convenience of receiving a single monthly bill.
Another benefit of consolidated billing is the ability to share bulk discount pricing, Savings Plans, and Reserved Instances across the accounts in your organization. For instance, one account might not have enough monthly usage to qualify for discount pricing. However, when multiple accounts are combined, their aggregated usage may result in a benefit that applies across all accounts in the organization.
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.
- This helps you to accurately determine how close your usage is to your budgeted amounts or to the AWS Free Tier limits.
- You can also set custom alerts when your usage exceeds (or is forecasted to exceed) the budgeted amount.
Example: AWS Budgets
Suppose that you have set a budget for Amazon EC2. You want to ensure that your company’s usage of Amazon EC2 does not exceed $200 for the month.
In AWS Budgets, you could set a custom budget to notify you when your usage has reached half of this amount ($100). This setting would allow you to receive an alert and decide how you would like to proceed with your continued use of Amazon EC2.
AWS Cost Explorer
- A tool that enables you to visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time.
- Includes a default report of the costs and usage for your top five cost-accruing AWS services.
- You can apply custom filters and groups to analyze your data. For example, you can view resource usage at the hourly level.
AWS Support Plan
- Basic
- Developer
- Business
- Enterprise
- Basic Support
Basic Support is free for all AWS customers. It includes access to whitepapers, documentation, and support communities. With Basic Support, you can also contact AWS for billing questions and service limit increases.
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.
If your company needs support beyond the Basic level, you could consider purchasing Developer, Business, or Enterprise Support.
Developer, Business, and Enterprise Support
The Developer, Business, and Enterprise Support plans include all the benefits of Basic Support, in addition to the ability to open an unrestricted number of technical support cases. These three Support plans have pay-by-the-month pricing and require no long-term contracts.
The information in this course highlights only a selection of details for each Support plan. A complete overview of what is included in each Support plan, including pricing for each plan, is available on the AWS Support site.
In general, for pricing, the Developer plan has the lowest cost, the Business plan is in the middle, and the Enterprise plan has the highest cost.
Customers in the Developer Support plan have access to features such as:
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
For example, suppose that your company is exploring AWS services. You’ve heard about a few different AWS services. However, you’re unsure of how to potentially use them together to build applications that can address your company’s needs. In this scenario, the building-block architecture support that is included with the Developer Support plan could help you to identify opportunities for combining specific services and features.
Business Support
Customers with a Business Support plan have access to additional features, including:
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
Suppose that your company has the Business Support plan and wants to install a common third-party operating system onto your Amazon EC2 instances. You could contact AWS Support for assistance with installing, configuring, and troubleshooting the operating system. For advanced topics such as optimizing performance, using custom scripts, or resolving security issues, you may need to contact the third-party software provider directly.
Technical Account Manager (TAM)
The Enterprise Support plan includes access to a Technical Account Manager (TAM).
If your company has an Enterprise Support plan, the TAM is your primary point of contact at AWS. They provide guidance, architectural reviews, and ongoing communication with your company as you plan, deploy, and optimize your applications.
Your TAM provides expertise across the full range of AWS services. They help you design solutions that efficiently use multiple services together through an integrated approach.
For example, suppose that you are interested in developing an application that uses several AWS services together. Your TAM could provide insights into how to best use the services together. They achieve this, while aligning with the specific needs that your company is hoping to address through the new application.
Which Support plan includes all AWS Trusted Advisor checks at the lowest cost?
The correct response option is Business.
Only the Business and Enterprise Support plans include all AWS Trusted Advisor checks. Of these two Support plans, the Business Support plan has a lower cost.
AWS Marketplace
AWS Marketplace is a digital catalog that includes thousands of software listings from independent software vendors. You can use AWS Marketplace to find, test, and buy software that runs on AWS.
For each listing in AWS Marketplace, you can access detailed information on pricing options, available support, and reviews from other AWS customers.
You can also explore software solutions by industry and use case. For example, suppose that your company is in the healthcare industry. In AWS Marketplace, you can review use cases that software helps you to address, such as implementing solutions to protect patient records or using machine learning models to analyze a patient’s medical history and predict possible health risks.
AWS Marketplace categories
Icons to represent each AWS Marketplace category: Business Applications, Data and Analytics, DevOps, Infrastructure Software, Internet of Things (IoT), Machine Learning, Migration, and Security
AWS Marketplace offers products in several categories, such as Infrastructure Products, Business Applications, Data Products, and DevOps.
Within each category, you can narrow your search by browsing through product listings in subcategories. For example, subcategories in the DevOps category include areas such as Application Development, Monitoring, and Testing.
Three types of offers included in the AWS Free Tier: 12 months free, Always free, and Trials
Benefits of consolidated billing in AWS Organizations
Tools for planning, estimating, and reviewing AWS costs
Differences between the four AWS Support plans: Basic, Developer, Business, and Enterprise
How to discover software in AWS Marketplace
Which action can you perform with consolidated billing?
Combine usage across accounts to receive volume pricing discounts.
AWS Budgets - Review how much your predicted AWS usage will incur in costs by the end of the month
AWS Pricing Calculator - Create an estimate for the cost of your use cases on AWS
AWS Cost Explorer - Visualize and manage your AWS costs and usage over time
Question 2
Which pricing tool is used to visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time?
AWS Cost Explorer
AWS Pricing Calculator enables you to create an estimate for the cost of your use cases on AWS.
AWS Budgets enables you to create budgets to plan your service usage, service costs, and instance reservations. In AWS Budgets, you can also set custom alerts when your usage exceeds (or is forecasted to exceed) the budgeted amount.
The AWS Free Tier is a program that consists of three types of offers that allow customers to use AWS services without incurring costs: Always free, 12 months free, and Trials.
Which pricing tool enables you to receive alerts when your service usage exceeds a threshold that you have defined?
AWS Budgets
The correct response option is AWS Budgets.
In AWS Budgets, you can set custom alerts that will notify you when your service usage exceeds (or is forecasted to exceed) the amount that you have budgeted.
Your budget can be based on costs or usage. For example, you can set an alert that will notify you when you have incurred $100.00 of costs in Amazon EC2 or 500,000 requests in AWS Lambda.
The other response options are incorrect because:
From the billing dashboard in the AWS Management Console, you can view details on your AWS bill, such as service costs by Region, month to date spend, and more. However, you cannot set alerts from the billing dashboard.
The AWS Free Tier is a program that consists of three types of offers that allow customers to use AWS services without incurring costs: Always free, 12 months free, and Trials.
AWS Cost Explorer is a tool that enables you to visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time.
Your company wants to receive support from an AWS Technical Account Manager (TAM). Which support plan should you choose?
The correct response option is Enterprise.
A Technical Account Manager (TAM) is available only to AWS customers with an Enterprise Support plan. A TAM provides guidance, architectural reviews, and ongoing communication with your company as you plan, deploy, and optimize your applications.
Which service or resource is used to find third-party software that runs on AWS?
The correct response option is AWS Marketplace.
AWS Marketplace is a digital catalog that includes thousands of software listings from independent software vendors. You can use AWS Marketplace to find, test, and buy software that runs on AWS.
The other response options are incorrect because:
The AWS Free Tier consists of offers that allow customers to use AWS services without incurring costs. These offers are related to AWS services, not third-party software that can be used on AWS.
AWS Support is a resource that can answer questions about best practices, assist with troubleshooting issues, help you to identify ways to optimize your use of AWS services, and so on.
You can use the billing dashboard in the AWS Management Console to view details such as service costs by Region, the top services being used by your account, and forecasted billing costs. From the billing dashboard, you can also access other AWS billing tools, such as AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, and AWS Budgets Reports.
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