AWS Cloud Practitioner: EC2 Pricing

In this short series, I outline the notes that I took while preparing for the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam.

These are my personal notes that I have made while working through the A Cloud Guru exam practitioner course. They are in no way official notes from AWS.

I would advise you that if you do use my notes to help you revise for this exam, that you use them as a supplement to the most recent information in the White PapersExam Guide and go over your knowledge with practice exam papers.

Previous notes within this blog series:

EC2 Pricing

What Determines the Price?

  • Clock Hours of Server Time
  • Instance Type e.g. T1 micro etc
  • Pricing models
  • Number of Instances
  • Type of Load Balancing
  • Detailed Monitoring (every 1 minute)
  • Auto Scaling
  • Elastic IP Addresses
  • Operating Systems And Software Packages
  • Using EC2 Reserved Instances to reserve capacity and you’ll get a discount

What Determines Price for Lambda?

S3 and Lambda functions are serverless services

  • Request Pricing
    • Free Tier: 1 million requests per month
    • $0.20 per 1 million requests thereafter
  • Duration Pricing (how long are the functions executing for)
    • 400,000 GB-seconds per month free, up to 3.2 million seconds of compute time
    • $0.00001667 for every GB-second used thereafter
  • Additional charges
    • E.g. if the Lambda function reads or writes data to or from Amazon S3, you will be billed for the read/write requests and the data stored in S3

What Determines Price for EBS?

  • Volumes (per GB)
  • Snapshots (per GB)
  • Data Transfers

What Determines Price for S3?

  • Storage Class (Standard or IA or 1 AZ IA etc)
  • Storage used for data itself
  • No of requests

What Determines Price for Glacier?

  • Storage
  • Data retrieval – the greater the retrieval time the more cost savings you’ll have

What is Snowball?

  • AWS Snowball is a PB-scale data transport solution that uses secure appliances to transfer large amounts of data into and out of the AWS cloud.
  • Like a gigantic disk to use to move your data to AWS cloud

What Determines Price for Snowball?

  • Service fee per job
    • Snowball 50TB: $200
    • Snowball 80TB: $250
  • Daily Charge
    • First 10 days are free, after that it’s $15 a day
  • Data Transfer
    • Data Transfer in to S3 is free. Data transfer out is not.

What Determines Price for RDS?

  • Clock Hours of Server time
  • Database Characteristics – SQL etc
  • Database Purchase Type e.g. how large the db is
  • Number of Database Instances
  • Provisioned Storage e.g. how big in GBs
  • Additional Storage
  • Requests
  • Deployment types
  • Data transfers

DynamoDB

Three cost drivers:

  • Provisioned throughput (write)
  • Provisioned throughput (read)
  • Indexed data storage

What determines the price for CloudFront?

  • Traffic distribution
  • Number of requests
  • Data transfer out

Read the “How AWS Pricing Works” Whitepaper

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