Billing and Pricing

Pricing

Pricing Models in AWS

AWS has 4 pricing models : 1 - Pay as you go : pay for what you use, remain agile, responsive, meet scale demands. 2 - Save when you reserve : minimize risks, predictably manage budgets, comply with long-terms requirements. => Reservations are available for EC2 RI, DynamoDB Reserved capacity, ElastiCache Reserved Nodes, RDS reserved Instance, RedShift Reserved nodes. 3 - Pay less by using more : Volume based discounts. 4 - Pay less as AWS grows.

Compute Pricing :

EC2 Pricing : -> If you have an ELB ( Elastic load balancer) running, that also incurs costs depending how much time it runs for and how much data it processes. -> Per second billing for Linux ( After the first 60 seconds ). -> Per hour billing for all other OSs. => The EC2 Pricing depends on : -> Clock hours of server time : Resources incur charges when they are running. -> Instance type : Amazon EC2 provides a wide selection of instance types optimized to fit different use cases. Better instance = more expensive. -> Pricing model : -) On-demand Instances : Minimum of 60s, P-P-Second (Linux) or P-P-Hour (Windows) -) Reserved Instances : ->Up to 70% discount compared to O-D on hourly rate. -> 1 or 3 years commitment -> All upfront, partial upfront, no upfront. -) Spot Instances : -> up to 90% discount compared to O-D on h/rate. -> bid for unused capacity. -) Dedicated Instances : -> on-demand, reservation for 1 or 3 years commitment. -> Number of instances : you can provision multiple instances of your amazon EC2 and amazon EBS resources to handle peak loads. -> Transfer of data between Regions. -> Load Balancing : The number of hours of Elastic Load Balancer runs and the amount of data it processes contribute to the monthly cost. -> Detailed monitoring : For a fixed monthly rate, you can opt for detailed monitoring, which includes sever preselected metrics recorded once a minute. -> Auto Scaling : Automatically adjusts the number of amazon EC2 instances in your deployment according to conditions you define. -> Elastic IP addresses : You can have on Elastic IP (EIP) address associated with a running instance at no charge, charged if they are not attached to instances or NAT gateways. -> Operating systems and software packages : Operating system prices are included in instance prices, unless you choose to bring your own licenses.
ECS & Lambda Pricing : => Lambda : -> Pay per call -> Pay per duration. => ECS (Elastic container service) : -> No Additional charge for EC2 launch type. -> Pay for AWS resources ( e.g. EC2 instances or EBS volumes ) you create to store and run your application. -> Only pay for what you use, as you use it, there are no minimum fees and no upfront commitments. => Fargate : -> Fargate Launch Type Model : Pay fir vCPU and memory resources allocated to your applications in your containers.
Storage Pricing : => S3 pricing : -> Storage class : S3 standard, S3 Infrequent Access, S3 one-Zone IA, S3 Intelligent Tiering, S3 glacier and s3 glacier -> Number and size of objects : Price can be tiered. (based on volume) -> Number and type of requests. -> Data transfer OUT of the S3 region. -> S3 transfer Acceleration. -> Lifecycle Transitions. PS: Similar service EFS (ppu, has IAccess & lifecycle rules). => EBS pricing : -> Volume type (based on performance (SSD/HDD) -> Volumes : Volume storage for all EBS volume types is charged by the amount of GB you provision per month, so it doesn't affect the pricing if you use it all or not. -> Snapshots : snapshots storage is based on the amount of space your data consumes in Amazon S3. Because Amazon EBS does not save empty blocks, it is likely that the snapshot size will be considerably less than your volume size. -> Data Transfer : Amount of data transferred out of your application. Inbound data transfer is free.
Database Pricing : => RDS pricing : -> Per hour billing -> Database characteristics : Engine, Size, Memory class. -> Purchase type : on-demand, Reserved instances (1 or 3 years) with required up-front. -> Backup Storage : There is no additional charge for backup storage up to 100% of your total database storage for a region. -> Additional Storage ( per GB / month) -> Number of input and output requests per month. -> Deployment type ( Storage and I/O are variable) : Single AZ, Multiple AZs. -> Data transfer : outbound data transfer are tiered for volume discounts, inbound is free.
Content Delivery Pricing : => CloudFront : -> Traffic distribution : Pricing varies across geographic regions, and pricing is based on the edge location through which content is served. -> Requests : Number and type of requests ( HTTP or HTTPS) made and the geographic region in which the requests are made. -> Data transfer out (volume discount).
Networking Pricing : => To make networking costs lower : -> Use a private IP instead of public IP. ( for better network performance too ) -> Use same AZ for max savings, (you sacrifice the high availability).

Free Services & Free tier in AWS

Below you will find the most common free AWS services, by saying free, I mean they don't cost money themselves but they can provision AWS services which cost money.

IAM - Identity access management
VPC - Virtual Private Cloud.
Organizations and Consolidated Billing
Auto Scaling ( creating EC2 instances can incur costs).
CloudFormation ( it can provision AWS services which cost money).
Elastic Beanstalk ( It can provision AWS services which cost money).
Free tier : https://aws.amazon.com/free/

Account Best Practices - Summary

For a better accounting practice, make sure to follow the instructions below.

Operate multiple accounts using Organizations.
Use SCP ( Service Control Policies ) to restrict account power
Easily setup multiple accounts with best-practices with AWS Control Tower. ACT -> Easy way to set up and govern a secure and compliant multi-account AWS environment based on best practices. => Benefits : -> Automate the set up of your environment in a few clicks. -> Automate ongoing policy management using guardrails. -> Detect policy violations and remediate them -> Monitor compliance through an interactive dashboard. ->ACT runs on top of AWS organizations, and it automatically sets up AWS Organizations to organize accounts and implement SCPs (Service Control Policies).
Use Tags & Cost Allocation Tags for easy management & billing.
IAM guidelines : MFA, least-privilege, password policy, password rotation.
Config to record all resources configurations & compliance over time.
Cloud-Formation to deploy stacks across accounts and regions.
Trusted Advisor to get insights, Support Plans adapted to your needs.
Send Service logs and Access logs to S3 or Cloud-Watch logs -> For a better security practice.
Cloud-Trail to record API calls made within your account.
If your Account is compromised : Change the root password, delete and rotate all passwords / keys, Contact the AWS support.

Billing and Costing Tools - Summary

Compute Optimizer : Recommends resources configurations to reduce cost.
TCO (total cost ownerships) Calculator : From on premises to AWS, it also provides a set of detailed reports which you use in execute presentations.
Simply Monthly Calculator / Pricing Calculator : cost of services on AWS.
Billing Dashboard : high level overview of what you've spent + free tier dashboard.
Cost Allocation Tags: tag resources to create detailed reports. => useful for organizing resources.
Cost and Usage Reports: most comprehensive billing dataset. Including things like additional metadata about AWS services, pricing and reservations. -> Presented in a .csv file.
Cost Explorer : View current usage ( detailed) for forecast usage. -> View costs from past 13 months and current detailed costs and forecast costs for up to 3 months based on previous usage.
Billing Alarms : in us-east-I "N. Virginia" - track overall and pre-service billing. (I mean it will make a simple alarm for going over a cost).
Budgets : more advanced - track usage, costs, Reserved Instance, and get Customized alerts when any budget goes above a certain threshold. -> Cost budgets and usage budgets are free.
Savings Plans: easy way to save based on long-term usage of AWS. -> Commit a certain $/h for 1 or 3 years. => EC2 savings plan : +)Up to 72% discount compared to O-D +)All upfront, partial upfront, no upfront (less discount). => Compute Savings Plan : +) Up to 66% discount compared to O-D +)Regardless of Family Region, size, OS, tenancy, compute options. +)Compute Options: EC2, Fargate, Lambda..
Trusted Advisor : Online tool that provides you real time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices.

AWS Basic Support Plan : -> Customer service & Communities - 24 x 7 access to customer service, documentation, whitepapers, and support forums. -> Trusted Advisor - Access to the 7 core trusted advisor checks and guidance to provision your resources following best practices to increase performance and improve security. -> Personal Health Dashboard - A personalized view of the health of AWS services, and alerts when you resources are impacted.
AWS Developer Support Plan : -> All Basic Support plan + -> Business hours email access to cloud Support Associates. -> Unlimited cases / I primary contact. -> Case severity / response times : - General guidance < 24 business hours. - System impaired < 12 business hours.
AWS Business Support Plan (24/7) : -> Intended to be used if you have production workloads. -> Trusted Advisor - Full set of checks + API access. -> 24 x 7 phone, email, and chat access to cloud support Engineers. ->Unlimited cases / unlimited contacts -> Access to Infrastructure Event Management for additional fee. -> Case severity / response times : - General guidance < 24 business hours - System impaired < 12 business hours - Production system impaired < 4 hours - Production system down < 1 hour.
AWS Enterprise Support Plan (24/7) : -> Intended to be used if you have mission critical workloads -> All of Business Support Plan + -> Access to Technical Account Manager (TAM) ->Concierge Support Team (for billing and account best practices) -> Infrastructure Event Management, Well-Architected & Operations Reviews. -> Case severity / response times : - Production system impaired <4 hours - Production system down < 1 hour - Business-critical system down < 15 minutes

Last updated 2 years ago

Pricing

Pricing Models in AWS

Compute Pricing :

EC2 Pricing : -> If you have an ELB ( Elastic load balancer) running, that also incurs costs depending how much time it runs for and how much data it processes. -> Per second billing for Linux ( After the first 60 seconds ). -> Per hour billing for all other OSs. => The EC2 Pricing depends on : -> Clock hours of server time : Resources incur charges when they are running. -> Instance type : Amazon EC2 provides a wide selection of instance types optimized to fit different use cases. Better instance = more expensive. -> Pricing model : -) On-demand Instances : Minimum of 60s, P-P-Second (Linux) or P-P-Hour (Windows) -) Reserved Instances : ->Up to 70% discount compared to O-D on hourly rate. -> 1 or 3 years commitment -> All upfront, partial upfront, no upfront. -) Spot Instances : -> up to 90% discount compared to O-D on h/rate. -> bid for unused capacity. -) Dedicated Instances : -> on-demand, reservation for 1 or 3 years commitment. -> Number of instances : you can provision multiple instances of your amazon EC2 and amazon EBS resources to handle peak loads. -> Transfer of data between Regions. -> Load Balancing : The number of hours of Elastic Load Balancer runs and the amount of data it processes contribute to the monthly cost. -> Detailed monitoring : For a fixed monthly rate, you can opt for detailed monitoring, which includes sever preselected metrics recorded once a minute. -> Auto Scaling : Automatically adjusts the number of amazon EC2 instances in your deployment according to conditions you define. -> Elastic IP addresses : You can have on Elastic IP (EIP) address associated with a running instance at no charge, charged if they are not attached to instances or NAT gateways. -> Operating systems and software packages : Operating system prices are included in instance prices, unless you choose to bring your own licenses.

ECS & Lambda Pricing : => Lambda : -> Pay per call -> Pay per duration. => ECS (Elastic container service) : -> No Additional charge for EC2 launch type. -> Pay for AWS resources ( e.g. EC2 instances or EBS volumes ) you create to store and run your application. -> Only pay for what you use, as you use it, there are no minimum fees and no upfront commitments. => Fargate : -> Fargate Launch Type Model : Pay fir vCPU and memory resources allocated to your applications in your containers.

Storage Pricing : => S3 pricing : -> Storage class : S3 standard, S3 Infrequent Access, S3 one-Zone IA, S3 Intelligent Tiering, S3 glacier and s3 glacier -> Number and size of objects : Price can be tiered. (based on volume) -> Number and type of requests. -> Data transfer OUT of the S3 region. -> S3 transfer Acceleration. -> Lifecycle Transitions. PS: Similar service EFS (ppu, has IAccess & lifecycle rules). => EBS pricing : -> Volume type (based on performance (SSD/HDD) -> Volumes : Volume storage for all EBS volume types is charged by the amount of GB you provision per month, so it doesn't affect the pricing if you use it all or not. -> Snapshots : snapshots storage is based on the amount of space your data consumes in Amazon S3. Because Amazon EBS does not save empty blocks, it is likely that the snapshot size will be considerably less than your volume size. -> Data Transfer : Amount of data transferred out of your application. Inbound data transfer is free.

Database Pricing : => RDS pricing : -> Per hour billing -> Database characteristics : Engine, Size, Memory class. -> Purchase type : on-demand, Reserved instances (1 or 3 years) with required up-front. -> Backup Storage : There is no additional charge for backup storage up to 100% of your total database storage for a region. -> Additional Storage ( per GB / month) -> Number of input and output requests per month. -> Deployment type ( Storage and I/O are variable) : Single AZ, Multiple AZs. -> Data transfer : outbound data transfer are tiered for volume discounts, inbound is free.

Content Delivery Pricing : => CloudFront : -> Traffic distribution : Pricing varies across geographic regions, and pricing is based on the edge location through which content is served. -> Requests : Number and type of requests ( HTTP or HTTPS) made and the geographic region in which the requests are made. -> Data transfer out (volume discount).

Networking Pricing : => To make networking costs lower : -> Use a private IP instead of public IP. ( for better network performance too ) -> Use same AZ for max savings, (you sacrifice the high availability).

Free Services & Free tier in AWS

Below you will find the most common free AWS services, by saying free, I mean they don't cost money themselves but they can provision AWS services which cost money.

IAM - Identity access management

VPC - Virtual Private Cloud.

Organizations and Consolidated Billing

Auto Scaling ( creating EC2 instances can incur costs).

CloudFormation ( it can provision AWS services which cost money).

Elastic Beanstalk ( It can provision AWS services which cost money).

Free tier : https://aws.amazon.com/free/

Account Best Practices - Summary

For a better accounting practice, make sure to follow the instructions below.

Operate multiple accounts using Organizations.

Use SCP ( Service Control Policies ) to restrict account power

Easily setup multiple accounts with best-practices with AWS Control Tower. ACT -> Easy way to set up and govern a secure and compliant multi-account AWS environment based on best practices. => Benefits : -> Automate the set up of your environment in a few clicks. -> Automate ongoing policy management using guardrails. -> Detect policy violations and remediate them -> Monitor compliance through an interactive dashboard. ->ACT runs on top of AWS organizations, and it automatically sets up AWS Organizations to organize accounts and implement SCPs (Service Control Policies).

Use Tags & Cost Allocation Tags for easy management & billing.

IAM guidelines : MFA, least-privilege, password policy, password rotation.

Config to record all resources configurations & compliance over time.

Cloud-Formation to deploy stacks across accounts and regions.

Trusted Advisor to get insights, Support Plans adapted to your needs.

Send Service logs and Access logs to S3 or Cloud-Watch logs -> For a better security practice.

Cloud-Trail to record API calls made within your account.

If your Account is compromised : Change the root password, delete and rotate all passwords / keys, Contact the AWS support.

Billing and Costing Tools - Summary

Compute Optimizer : Recommends resources configurations to reduce cost.

TCO (total cost ownerships) Calculator : From on premises to AWS, it also provides a set of detailed reports which you use in execute presentations.

Simply Monthly Calculator / Pricing Calculator : cost of services on AWS.

Billing Dashboard : high level overview of what you've spent + free tier dashboard.

Cost Allocation Tags: tag resources to create detailed reports. => useful for organizing resources.

Cost and Usage Reports: most comprehensive billing dataset. Including things like additional metadata about AWS services, pricing and reservations. -> Presented in a .csv file.

Cost Explorer : View current usage ( detailed) for forecast usage. -> View costs from past 13 months and current detailed costs and forecast costs for up to 3 months based on previous usage.

Billing Alarms : in us-east-I "N. Virginia" - track overall and pre-service billing. (I mean it will make a simple alarm for going over a cost).

Budgets : more advanced - track usage, costs, Reserved Instance, and get Customized alerts when any budget goes above a certain threshold. -> Cost budgets and usage budgets are free.

Savings Plans: easy way to save based on long-term usage of AWS. -> Commit a certain $/h for 1 or 3 years. => EC2 savings plan : +)Up to 72% discount compared to O-D +)All upfront, partial upfront, no upfront (less discount). => Compute Savings Plan : +) Up to 66% discount compared to O-D +)Regardless of Family Region, size, OS, tenancy, compute options. +)Compute Options: EC2, Fargate, Lambda..

Trusted Advisor : Online tool that provides you real time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices.

AWS Basic Support Plan : -> Customer service & Communities - 24 x 7 access to customer service, documentation, whitepapers, and support forums. -> Trusted Advisor - Access to the 7 core trusted advisor checks and guidance to provision your resources following best practices to increase performance and improve security. -> Personal Health Dashboard - A personalized view of the health of AWS services, and alerts when you resources are impacted.

AWS Developer Support Plan : -> All Basic Support plan + -> Business hours email access to cloud Support Associates. -> Unlimited cases / I primary contact. -> Case severity / response times : - General guidance < 24 business hours. - System impaired < 12 business hours.

AWS Business Support Plan (24/7) : -> Intended to be used if you have production workloads. -> Trusted Advisor - Full set of checks + API access. -> 24 x 7 phone, email, and chat access to cloud support Engineers. ->Unlimited cases / unlimited contacts -> Access to Infrastructure Event Management for additional fee. -> Case severity / response times : - General guidance < 24 business hours - System impaired < 12 business hours - Production system impaired < 4 hours - Production system down < 1 hour.

AWS Enterprise Support Plan (24/7) : -> Intended to be used if you have mission critical workloads -> All of Business Support Plan + -> Access to Technical Account Manager (TAM) ->Concierge Support Team (for billing and account best practices) -> Infrastructure Event Management, Well-Architected & Operations Reviews. -> Case severity / response times : - Production system impaired <4 hours - Production system down < 1 hour - Business-critical system down < 15 minutes