Cost Fundamentals

General cost fundamentals in AWS:

Compute → Charged hour/second, varies per instance type.
Storage → Charged typically per GB.
Data Transfer → Charged typically per GB.
- Data In → Free in most cases.
- Data Out → Aggregated and charged.
- Data transfer between services in the same region.

Payment philosophy:

Pay for what you use.
Pay less if you reserve.
Pay less when AWS grows → AWS economies of scale.
- Future, higher-performant resources replace old ones at the same price.

Discounts:

Free of charge services → May charge for underlying services:

On-Premises vs Cloud

Financial estimate of the direct + indirect costs of running a service.

Some costs to be taken into account → AWS reduces all those costs by up to 96% (Server, Storage, Network, IT Labor).

Tool to explore services and estimate costs. It can model solutions to determine the costs.

Service that ties billing of multiple accounts, it consolidates accounts into an organizational tree.

Service used to pay the AWS bill, monitor usage, and budget expenses. Can forecast costs and usage in the future.

Other services can be reached from here:

AWS Budgets → Create notifications and alerts (SNS or email notifications) when going over budget.
AWS Cost Explorer → Visualize (top 5 cost-accruing services), understand, and manage costs over time. View all services in a table. Up to 12 months of history.
- ⚠️ Must be enabled by the owner of the account before used.
- Can generate cost reports and forecasts.
AWS Cost and Usage Report → Comprehensive information about cost and usage for each service category.
- Can publish daily reports to S3.
- Can track reserved instance utilization, charges, and allocations.
AWS Bills → Bills you had in previous months with breakdowns.

Can activate Cost Allocation Tags (CAT) to organize costs and track them on a detailed level. CAT can generate detailed reports of spending.

Provide resources for the customers to succeed.

Support services:

Support Concierge → Billing and account expert that provides analysis on billing and account issues.
Trusted Advisor → Automated service that looks for opportunities to reduce costs. Points out corrections in implementations.
Technical Account Manager → Primary point of contact, can provide continuous communication while you develop solutions. Only for enterprise support plans.

Support plans:

Basic → Free, support for basic technical support.
Developer → Additional features such as best-practice guidelines and other guides.
Business → Access to more advanced support features.
Enterprise → Exclusive access to Technical Account Manager.

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