AWS Pricing and Billing Services for Cloud and DevOps Engineers

📝Introduction

This post will cover the main principles of AWS Pricing and Billing Services.

📝AWS Pricing

• Pay only for the individual services you need, for as long as you use them, and without requiring long-term contracts or complex licensing.

• Only pay for the services you consume, and once you stop using them, there are no additional costs or termination fees.

• Types of Pay:

  • Pay-as-you-go -> It allows you to easily adapt to changing business needs without overcommitting budgets and improving your responsiveness to changes.

  • Save when you commit -> For example, using AWS Compute and AWS Machine Learning, Savings Plans offer savings over On-Demand in exchange for a commitment to use a specific amount (measured in $/hour) of an AWS service or a category of services, for a one- or three-year period.

  • Pay less by using more -> For example, with AWS, you can get volume-based discounts and realize important savings as your usage increases. For services such as S3, pricing is tiered, meaning the more you use, the less you pay per GB.

• There are 3 AWS Free offer types:

  • 12 months free (AWS EC2*, S3*, RDS*, EBS*, etc)

  • Always free (AWS Lambda*, SNS*, CloudFront*, etc)

  • Trials (AWS RedShift*, LightSail*, SageMaker*, etc)

*Note - There are some types of limits of use, kindly check on this link.

• EC AWS Pricing:

  • On-Demand Instances (Pay by the hour or second)

  • Spot Instances (Utilize spare computing capacity)

  • Saving Plans (Low price for consistent usage)

  • Reservations (Reserving capacity ahead of time)

    

• AWS Lambda Pricing:

  • Number of requests (Test invokes from the console count)

  • Code Execution Time (From execution start in response to events to stop)

  • Always free ( 1 million requests per month)

    

• AWS S3 Pricing:

  • Storage Class (Various storage classes)

  • Data Transfer (Data Transferred out of S3 region)

  • Storage (Number and size of objects)

  • Request and Data retrieval (Requests made for data and amount of requests)

• AWS RDS Pricing:

  • Running clock hours

  • Type of Database

  • Storage

  • Purchase type

  • Database count

  • API requests

  • Data Transfer

  • Deployment type

    

• AWS Total Cost of Ownership(TCO) -> It is a comparative total cost of ownership analysis (acquisition and operating costs) for running an infrastructure environment end-to-end on-premises or in a co-location facility versus AWS. In simple words, it is a financial estimate that helps you understand both the direct and indirect costs of AWS.

  

  • AWS TCO Methodology:

    

• AWS Application Discovery Service -> It helps to plan cloud migration projects by gathering information about your on-premises data centres.

  • Discover on-premises server inventory and behaviour to plan cloud migrations

  • Identify server dependencies

  • Measure server performance

  • Data Exploration in Amazon Athena

  • Integrate discovery data to other AWS services such as AWS Migration Hub and AWS DMS Fleet Advisor

    

• AWS Pricing Calculator -> It is a tool to provide a cost estimate that fits your unique business or personal needs with AWS products and services.

  • Explore services based on your use cases

  • Find instance types that fit your needs

  • Transparent pricing

  • Share your estimates

  • Hierarchical estimates

  • Estimate exports

    

📝AWS Billing

• AWS Billing -> It provides a monthly view of your chargeable costs and uses some proper tools for that.

  • Easy Data Access

  • Reconcile invoices to detailed billing data

  • Consolidated Billing

  • Display the most recent estimated charges based on services metered to date

  • Invoices are generated when a monthly billing period closes, or when subscriptions or one-time purchases are made

  • For users of AWS Organizations, users logged into the management account can view consolidated charges for all member accounts, with account-level detail available on the “Charges by account” tab

  • Provides details of AWS-provided services as well as purchases made through the AWS Marketplace

  • For users of AWS Billing Conductor, AWS Bills provides pro forma data to member accounts and the primary accounts of a billing group; management accounts can toggle between chargeable and pro forma data views

  • AWS Billing tools:

    • AWS Budgets -> It improves planning and cost control with flexible budgeting and forecasting.

      • Track costs, usage, and coverage with custom budgets

      • Stay informed on forecasted spending and resource use

      • Create custom actions to prevent overages, inefficient resource use, or lack of coverage

      • Budget Alerts are received from email or SNS notifications if you exceed your threshold

      • Budgets in the Real World Scenarios:

        • Create scheduled reports. Stay informed on how actual or forecasted costs and usage progress toward your budget threshold.

          

    • AWS Cost and Usage Reports(CUR) -> It to review, itemize, and organize the most comprehensive cost and usage data for your account.

      • Dive deeper into your AWS cost and usage data

      • Detailed and comprehensive reports

      • Understand cost drivers at the resource level and identify cost optimization opportunities

      • Grouped by cost service category and cost allocation tags

      • CUR in the Real World Scenarios:

        • Understand cost anomalies. Analyze your costs in greater detail when your bill is higher or lower than expected.

          

    • AWS Cost Explorer -> It is an easy-to-use interface that lets you visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time.

      • Get started quickly by creating custom reports that analyze cost and usage data

      • Analyze your data at a high level or dive deeper into your cost and usage data to identify trends, pinpoint cost drivers, and detect anomalies

      • View the past 13 months

      • Forecast for up to 3 months

      • Cost Explorer in the Real World Scenarios:

        • Forecast your costs. Create a forecast by selecting a future time range for your report. You can use a forecast to estimate your AWS bill and set alarms and budgets based on predictions.

          

Thank you for reading. I hope you were able to understand and learn something helpful from my blog.

Please follow me on Hashnode and on LinkedIn franciscojblsouza