Sec. 18: Account Management, Billing & Support [2/2]

Which services are free to use in AWS?

• IAM, VPC, Consolidated Billing, and Elastic Beanstalk

• Elastic Beanstalk, CloudFormation, Auto Scaling Groups, and Lambda

• SNS, SQS, IAM, VPC

• All services have a free tier included

Answer explanation

These services are free to use. Be careful, the resources created in Elastic Beanstalk (as well as in CloudFormation and Auto Scaling Groups) are not free.

This was discussed in Lecture 214: Pricing Models of the Cloud

CloudFront pricing is the same in every geographic region.

• True

• False

Answer explanation

CloudFront pricing is different across different geographic regions.

When you reserve, the larger the upfront payment, the smaller the discount.

• True

• False, the upfront payment does not matter on the discount

• False, the larger the upfront, the bigger the discount

Answer explanation

When the upfront payment is higher, the discount is bigger.

Which of the following is NOT a pricing factor in S3?

• Storage class

• Data transfer into S3

• Objects size

• Type of requests

Answer explanation

Inbound data transfer in the S3 region is free.

EBS Snapshots are added cost in GB per month.

• True

• False

Answer explanation

The added data storage by EBS Snapshots are added cost in GB per month to EBS pricing. Other EBS pricing factors are: Volume type, Provisioned storage volume, IOPS, etc.

Which of the following options can provide up to 66% discount compared to On-demand for a commitment to a consistent amount of usage for 1 or 3 years and offers the possibility to change EC2 instances family type?

• Spot instances

• Reserved instances

• Compute Savings Plans

• EC2 Instance Savings Plans

Answer explanation

Compute Savings Plans provide the most flexibility and help to reduce your costs by up to 66% in exchange for a commitment to a consistent amount of usage for a 1 or 3 year term. These plans automatically apply to EC2 instance usage regardless of instance family, size, AZ, region, OS or tenancy, and also apply to Fargate or Lambda usage.

You are running an on-demand Linux EC2 instance, what timing is applied regarding billing?

• Pay per minute

• Pay per hour

• Pay per day

• Pay per second

Answer explanation

With Linux EC2 instances, you pay per second of compute capacity. There is also a minimum of 60s of use.

Which pricing model allows you to minimize risks, predictably manage budgets, and comply with long-term requirements, and is available for EC2, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, RDS, and Redshift?

• Pay as you go

• Pay less as AWS grows

• Pay less by using more

• Save when you reserve

Answer explanation

Reservations are available for EC2 Reserved Instances, DynamoDB Reserved Capacity, ElastiCache Reserved Nodes, RDS Reserved Instance, Redshift Reserved Nodes. Reservations allow you to minimize risks, predictably manage budgets and comply with long-term requirements.

Which RDS pricing option is the most cost-effective if you need capacity for 3 years?

• On-demand

• Spot Instances

• Dedicated Instances

• Reserved Instances

Answer explanation

Reserved Instances are good and more cost-effective (up to 69% discount compared to On-demand pricing, depending on the upfront) for long workloads. You can reserve instances for 1 or 3 years in RDS.