Cloud financial management
Billing, pricing and support are 12% of the exam. What matters is knowing which tool answers each cost question.
Pricing Calculator
AWS Pricing Calculator
Estimates the cost of an architecture before you build it.
Key points
- Free, and no AWS account required.
- Builds estimates per service and Region.
- Estimates can be exported and shared.
On the exam
"Estimate the cost before migrating": Pricing Calculator. Analyze what was already spent: Cost Explorer.
Cost Explorer
AWS Cost Explorer
Visualizes, understands and analyzes costs and usage over time.
Key points
- Charts by service, account, Region and tag.
- Forecasts future spend.
- Savings Plans and Reserved Instance recommendations.
On the exam
"See the spending trend over recent months and forecast the next ones": Cost Explorer.
Budgets
AWS Budgets
Sets cost and usage budgets and alerts you when actual or forecasted values exceed the threshold.
Key points
- Alerts by email or SNS notification.
- Cost, usage, Savings Plans and reservation budgets.
- Can trigger automatic actions.
On the exam
"Be notified when spending exceeds an amount": Budgets.
Cost and Usage Report
AWS CUR
The most detailed cost and usage data set, delivered as files to S3.
Key points
- Detail by hour, resource and tag.
- Can be queried with Athena, Redshift or Quick Sight.
- Includes activated cost allocation tags.
On the exam
The most granular billing report: Cost and Usage Report.
A discount in exchange for a commitment to an hourly spend (USD/hour) for the contracted term.
Key points
- All, partial or no upfront payment.
- Discounts apply automatically to eligible usage.
- Cost Explorer recommends the ideal commitment.
On the exam
Compute Savings Plans is the most flexible: it covers any family, Region, EC2, Fargate and Lambda.
Types
| Type | Characteristics |
|---|---|
| Compute |
|
| EC2 Instance |
|
| Database |
|
| SageMaker AI |
|
Consolidated billing
AWS Organizations
One bill for every account in an organization, paid by the management account.
Key points
- Usage across accounts is combined to reach volume discounts.
- Reserved Instances and Savings Plans can be shared across accounts.
- No extra charge.
On the exam
Many accounts, one bill and volume discounts: Organizations consolidated billing.
Network cost depends on the direction and destination of the traffic.
Key points
- Data in from the internet to AWS: generally free.
- Data out from AWS to the internet: charged per GB.
- Between Regions and between Availability Zones: charged.
- Within the same AZ over private IPs: generally free.
On the exam
If a question asks which traffic is not charged, the answer is usually inbound data transfer.