Content Domain 4: Billing, Pricing, and Support

Task Statement 4.2: Understand resources for billing, budget, and cost management

Let's get started with the second task statement to understand resources for billing, budget, and cost management. In our last lesson, we talked about the need to implement a good monitoring and cost management solution to understand your resource needs, how costs are allocated, and to measure and monitor your architecture. We also mentioned that your architecture will most likely be changing so you need measures in place to monitor and measure your usage and your cost. Using AWS Cost Explorer and the AWS Cost and Usage Reports, you can monitor your utilization of CPU, RAM, storage, and so on to identify instances that could be downsized or may need to be increased. We have mentioned these services several times already but AWS provides CloudWatch to track our metrics and alarms to immediately take actions. There are other services too but it is crucial to define your metrics, set target goals, define and enforce your tagging strategy, use cost allocation tags, and make sure you are regularly reviewing for any infrastructure changes. This will require a good understanding of cost management tools. For example, how do you use cost allocation tags? One way is to use tags to filter views in Cost Explorer to help analyze costs. For example, if you wanted high level interactive financial reports would you use AWS Cost Explorer or the AWS Cost and Usage Report? Cost Explorer gives you a high-level view that you can then drill down into more specifics. AWS Cost and Usage Reports breakdown costs by the hour, day, month, product, resource tags, and so on to provide the most granular data about your AWS cost and usage, and you can send that data to Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, AWS QuickSight, or another tool to perform quick queries and more. You can also create billing alarms, free tier alarms, and alarms with AWS Budgets. Know different ways you can trigger automated actions based on defined budget thresholds. This can help you keep a close eye on the state of your AWS bill and be alerted if you're exceeding any cost threshold set for the account. AWS Organizations and Control Tower help to centrally manage billing, control access, compliance, security, and share resources too. Ensure you know the benefits of consolidated billing. You can also use data visualization tools like Amazon QuickSight to analyze AWS Cost and Usage Reports, or to create custom reports. So, you're going to want to ensure you know the high-level functionality of Amazon QuickSight. Be sure to know how to use AWS Auto Scaling and Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling to help minimize costs by ensuring you only have the appropriate number of instances to match your customer demand. Know other AWS services, such as AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway, that can automatically scale up and down. Again, Trusted Advisor can give recommendations when it finds underutilized EBS volumes in your account. Having monitoring in place to establish a baseline of your usage is a big part of being able to rightsize your volumes. Ensure you continue to track the correct metrics to determine if you need to modify your solution for cost optimization. You can also optimize the cost for EBS by paying attention to how many IOPS you're using and then comparing that to how many IOPS you're paying for. If you are paying for the most optimized, most performant volume type but are not using that capacity, then you may be able to change your volume type to save money without taking a performance hit. Know how you can use data lifecycle rules to automatically delete data that is no longer needed to reduce your storage costs and be prepared to choose the most cost-effective storage when provided a set of requirements. Check out the services Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager and AWS Backup to learn more about solutions for automatically deleting old EBS snapshots or backups from other AWS services as this could help you reduce the storage costs within an AWS account. For Amazon S3, you can optimize for costs by making use of the different storage classes when appropriate. You should be familiar with the different S3 storage classes and how they impact both cost and retrieval times. You don't need to know the exact pricing for the S3 storage tiers, but you should know the trade-offs that are made between storage costs and retrieval costs for each tier, and know how that can impact your AWS bill, given a scenario for data storage and access patterns. Here's a question. Amazon S3 has a wide variety of storage classes that you can use to minimize cost based on your use case. Which Amazon S3 capability allows you to automatically transition all objects in a bucket based after a period of time? S3 Lifecycle Configuration or Intelligent Tiering? Lifecycle policies can help with this. Which S3 storage class will automatically move each individual object to the most cost-effective access tier when access patterns change? Intelligent Tiering is a great storage class for this requirement, but remember you can create lifecycle policies with other S3 storage classes too. Dive deeper into S3, you will most likely get a few storage cost optimization questions where S3 is the answer or a plausible distractor. Is it possible to configure an S3 bucket to have the requestor pay the cost of the request and the data downloaded in instead of the S3 bucket owner? Yes, it is if you configure the requester to pay for storage transfers and usage. You also need to know the different options for optimizing the data migration calls for hybrid environments like AWS DataSync, the Snow family, the AWS Transfer family, and AWS Storage Gateway. If your organization decides to move 250 terabytes of archive data from their internal servers to S3, what is the fastest and most cost-effective way to import the data to S3? AWS Snowmobile, establish a Direct Connect connection to transfer the data to S3, order multiple Snowball devices, or upload it directly using their current one hundred megabits per second dedicated line? The Snowball is usually a strong choice for data transfer, especially if you need that transfer to be more secure and quickly transfer terabytes to petabytes of data to AWS. Architecting for data transfer ensures that you minimize data transfer costs. Let's say you are building a data lake using Amazon S3 as your storage platform. What data transfer would incur costs? When you transfer data from Amazon S3 to the internet, you are charged for the storage size per month and the Region that the object will be transferred to. Here is another question. Will AWS charge you for data transferred between two Regions? Yes, AWS charges you for data transferred between two different Regions. This is similar to the costs incurred from the data transfer between the AWS network and the public internet. Also, know that you can estimate costs to migrate and run your workloads on AWS with the AWS Pricing Calculator that provides an esteemed monthly cost of AWS services for your use case based on your expected usage. Here is another question. Which service offers volume discounts when you enable consolidated billing? Remember that consolidated billing enables you to share resources, see a combined view of AWS costs incurred by all accounts in your department or company, as well as obtain a detailed cost report for each individual AWS account associated with your paying account. For billing purposes, AWS treats all the accounts in the AWS Organization as if they were one account. Some services, such as Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, have volume pricing tiers across certain usage dimensions that give you lower prices the more you use the service. With consolidated billing, AWS combines the usage from all accounts to determine which volume pricing tier to apply, giving you a lower overall price whenever possible and then allocates each linked account a portion of the overall volume discount based on the account's usage. Let's wrap up this lesson and talk about another service. The AWS Billing Conductor, which is a custom billing service that can support the showback and chargeback workflows of AWS Solution Providers and Enterprise customers. Let's get started with our last test statement for this course which is to identify AWS technical resources and AWS support options.