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AWS Billing, Pricing, and Support

This section covers AWS pricing models, cost management tools, and support plans - essential knowledge for the Cloud Practitioner exam (Domain 4: Billing, Pricing, and Support - 12%).

AWS Pricing Models

EC2 Pricing Options

On-Demand Instances

  • Pay-as-you-go with no upfront commitment
  • Billed per second (minimum 60 seconds) for Linux, per hour for Windows
  • Best for: Unpredictable workloads, short-term projects, testing
  • Cost: Highest cost per hour, but most flexible

Reserved Instances (RIs)

  • Commit to 1 or 3 years for significant discounts
  • Payment options:
  • All Upfront: Maximum discount (up to 72%)
  • Partial Upfront: Medium discount
  • No Upfront: Smallest discount but flexible cash flow
  • Types:
  • Standard RIs: Can't change instance type
  • Convertible RIs: Can change instance type (smaller discount)
  • Best for: Steady-state, predictable workloads

Spot Instances

  • Up to 90% discount on spare EC2 capacity
  • AWS can reclaim with 2-minute warning
  • Best for: Fault-tolerant, flexible workloads (batch processing, big data, testing)
  • Not suitable for: Critical applications, databases

Dedicated Hosts

  • Physical server dedicated to your use
  • Best for: Compliance requirements, software licensing (bring your own license)
  • Most expensive option

Savings Plans

  • Commit to hourly spend for 1 or 3 years
  • Compute Savings Plans: Up to 66% off, applies to EC2, Lambda, Fargate
  • EC2 Instance Savings Plans: Up to 72% off, specific to instance family
  • More flexible than Reserved Instances

📖 EC2 Pricing

S3 Pricing

S3 charges for: 1. Storage - Per GB/month based on storage class 2. Requests - PUT, GET, LIST, etc. 3. Data Transfer - Data out to internet (ingress is free) 4. Management Features - Inventory, analytics, Object Lock

S3 Storage Classes

Storage Class Use Case Cost
S3 Standard Frequently accessed data $$$
S3 Intelligent-Tiering Unknown access patterns $$ + monitoring fee
S3 Standard-IA Infrequent access (min 30 days) $$
S3 One Zone-IA Infrequent, non-critical data $
S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval Archive with millisecond access $
S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval Archive (3-5 hours retrieval) ¢
S3 Glacier Deep Archive Long-term archive (12-48 hours) ¢¢ (lowest)

📖 S3 Pricing

Data Transfer Pricing

Key principle: - Data IN to AWS = Generally FREE - Data OUT from AWS = CHARGED (per GB) - Data between services in same Region = Usually free or low cost - Data between Regions = CHARGED

Lambda Pricing

  • Requests: First 1 million free, then $0.20 per million
  • Duration: Charged per GB-second of compute time
  • Free tier: 1 million requests and 400,000 GB-seconds per month (always free)

📖 Lambda Pricing

RDS Pricing

Charges for: - Instance hours - DB instance running time - Database storage - Per GB/month - Backup storage - Above provisioned storage - Data transfer - Data out - Provisioned IOPS - If using io1 storage

AWS Free Tier

Three Types of Free Offers

  1. Always Free
  2. Never expires

  3. Examples: Lambda (1M requests/month), DynamoDB (25GB)

  4. 12 Months Free

  5. Free for 12 months after account creation

  6. Examples: EC2 (750 hours/month t2.micro), S3 (5GB), RDS (750 hours)

  7. Trials

  8. Short-term free trials for specific services
  9. Examples: Redshift (2-month trial), Inspector (90-day trial)

📖 AWS Free Tier

Cost Management Tools

AWS Pricing Calculator

  • Estimate costs before deploying
  • Create detailed cost estimates for AWS solutions
  • Compare pricing across Regions
  • Export and share estimates

📖 AWS Pricing Calculator

AWS Cost Explorer

  • Analyze past and current AWS costs
  • Visualize spending patterns over time
  • Forecast future costs (up to 12 months)
  • Identify cost drivers
  • Available at no additional cost

Key features: - Filter by service, linked account, tag, etc. - View daily, monthly, or hourly granularity - Resource Optimization recommendations

📖 AWS Cost Explorer

AWS Budgets

  • Set custom budgets for costs, usage, or reservations
  • Receive alerts when thresholds are exceeded
  • Set alerts at actual or forecasted amounts
  • Track RI/Savings Plan utilization

Budget types: - Cost budgets - Usage budgets - Reservation budgets - Savings Plans budgets

📖 AWS Budgets

AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR)

  • Most detailed billing data available
  • Hourly, daily, or monthly reports
  • Delivered to S3 bucket
  • Analyze with Athena, Redshift, or QuickSight

📖 Cost and Usage Reports

AWS Cost Allocation Tags

  • Tag resources to organize and track costs
  • Two types:
  • AWS-generated tags: Automatically applied (aws: prefix)
  • User-defined tags: Custom tags you create
  • Enable tags in Billing console for cost allocation reports

AWS Organizations

Consolidated Billing

  • Single payment method for all accounts in organization
  • Combined usage across accounts for volume discounts
  • One bill for multiple AWS accounts

Benefits

  • Volume discounts: Combined usage may qualify for lower rates
  • Reserved Instance sharing: RIs can apply across accounts
  • Simplified billing: Single invoice and payment
  • Service Control Policies (SCPs): Centralized permission guardrails

📖 AWS Organizations

AWS Support Plans

Basic Support (Free)

  • Included with all AWS accounts
  • 24/7 access to customer service
  • AWS Trusted Advisor - 7 core checks
  • AWS Personal Health Dashboard
  • Documentation and forums

Developer Support ($29/month or 3% of usage)

  • Everything in Basic, plus:
  • Business hours email support
  • 1 primary contact
  • Response times: < 24 hours (general), < 12 hours (system impaired)
  • Best for: Development and testing

Business Support ($100/month or 10% of usage)

  • Everything in Developer, plus:
  • 24/7 phone, email, chat support
  • Unlimited contacts
  • Response times: < 24 hours (general), < 12 hours (system impaired), < 4 hours (production down), < 1 hour (production down critical)
  • Full Trusted Advisor checks
  • AWS Support API
  • Third-party software support
  • Best for: Production workloads

Enterprise On-Ramp ($5,500/month)

  • Everything in Business, plus:
  • Technical Account Manager (TAM) pool
  • Concierge Support Team
  • Infrastructure Event Management
  • Response time: < 30 minutes (business-critical)
  • Best for: Production/business-critical workloads

Enterprise Support ($15,000/month or more)

  • Everything in Enterprise On-Ramp, plus:
  • Designated Technical Account Manager (TAM)
  • Response time: < 15 minutes (business-critical)
  • Operations Reviews
  • Training credits
  • Best for: Mission-critical workloads

📖 AWS Support Plans

Technical Account Manager (TAM)

  • Available only with Enterprise support
  • Provides proactive guidance and advocacy
  • Helps with:
  • Architecture reviews
  • Well-Architected reviews
  • Operations reviews
  • Incident management
  • Cost optimization

AWS Trusted Advisor

What It Does

  • Automated recommendations across five categories:
  • Cost Optimization - Idle resources, Reserved Instance optimization
  • Performance - Over-utilized resources
  • Security - Security group rules, MFA, IAM usage
  • Fault Tolerance - Backups, Multi-AZ, redundancy
  • Service Limits - Approaching service quotas

Access Levels

Support Plan Trusted Advisor Checks
Basic/Developer 7 core checks (S3 permissions, security groups, IAM, MFA, etc.)
Business/Enterprise All checks (50+)

📖 AWS Trusted Advisor

Other Billing Concepts

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

  • Compare on-premises vs AWS costs
  • Include: Hardware, software, networking, facilities, operations
  • AWS typically reduces TCO through:
  • No upfront investment
  • Pay-as-you-go pricing
  • Reduced operational overhead
  • Elasticity (right-sizing)

AWS Professional Services

  • Paid consulting from AWS experts
  • Help with cloud adoption, migrations, architecture
  • Not included in any support plan

AWS Partner Network (APN)

  • Third-party consultants and software providers
  • Two types:
  • Consulting Partners: Professional services firms
  • Technology Partners: Software providers (ISVs)

Exam Tips

Key Points to Remember

  1. Data transfer IN is generally free, data OUT is charged
  2. Spot Instances = Up to 90% discount, can be interrupted
  3. Reserved Instances = Up to 72% discount, 1 or 3 year commitment
  4. Savings Plans = Flexible alternative to RIs
  5. Cost Explorer = Analyze past costs and forecast future
  6. AWS Budgets = Set alerts for spending thresholds
  7. TAM = Only available with Enterprise support
  8. Trusted Advisor full checks = Business/Enterprise support only
  9. Consolidated Billing = Combined usage may qualify for volume discounts
  10. S3 Glacier Deep Archive = Lowest cost storage

Common Exam Questions

  • Which pricing model for unpredictable workloads? On-Demand
  • Which pricing model for steady-state workloads? Reserved Instances
  • Which pricing model for fault-tolerant batch jobs? Spot Instances
  • How to get alerted on spending? AWS Budgets
  • How to analyze historical costs? Cost Explorer
  • What support plan includes TAM? Enterprise
  • How to get volume discounts across accounts? AWS Organizations with Consolidated Billing