Summary: https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-cloud-practitioner-new/learn/lecture/20118378

• Contents:

General Overview of AWS Cloud Costs

Ref: https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-cloud-practitioner-new/learn/lecture/20056378

Pricing Models in AWS

1. Pay-as-you-go/Pay-per-use: pay for what you use, full-price
   • 👍 Advantages: remain agile, responsive, meet scale demands
   • 🔧 DEFAULT pricing model (assume we're using it unless specified otherwise)
2. Save when you reserve: reserve capacity, get discounts if you consume all reserved capacity
   • 👍 Advantages: minimize risks, predictably manage budgets, comply with long-terms requirements
   • 👎 Less flexibility than pay-as-you-go: if your workload/needs change and you don't consume your reserved capacity, you waste $$$ (might want to sell it in the reserved instance marketplace)
   • 💡 Reservations available only for certain products: EC2 reserved instances, DynamoDB reserved capacity, ElastiCache reserved nodes, RDS reserved instances, Redshift reserved nodes
3. Pay less by using more: volume-based discounts
   • e.g. if you use multiple accounts in an AWS Organization, you can get discounts if consuming lots of resources across the accounts
4. Pay less as AWS grows
   • The more customers that use AWS, the more stuff they can provision, the more they can discount to all customers

Free Stuff in AWS

• 12-month Free Tier for many AWS services: https://aws.amazon.com/free/
  • e.g. run an t2.micro EC2 instance for a year, or get for free an initial amount of GET requests to S3
  • ‼️ You can use the free tier indefinitely if you migrate your infrastructure between different accounts every year!!
    • Great for small projects → make sure to treat your AWS accounts as disposable, be ready to recreate them → IaC helps a lot with this
• Some services have Free Trials (e.g. use for free for 1 month)
• Some services and products are free
  • Completely free (e.g. IAM, VPC subnets)
  • Free themselves, but pay for created resources (e.g. CFN stacks, EB, ASG…)

Overview of Compute, Storage & Network Pricing in AWS

• Refresher: AWS Cloud Pricing Model in What is AWS?
• Recommended to watch lecture (https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-cloud-practitioner-new/learn/lecture/20056378) for a quick overview of pricing of most services (exam won't test for details)
• 💡 Trick: type “<AWS_SERVICE> pricing” in your search engine, and you will quickly get AWS docs on the pricing of that service. Useful to see if you can use it for free, if you need to pay peanuts, or if you need to mortgage your house. 🙂

Billing and Cost Management Tools in AWS