AWS Free Tier

• AWS Free Tier - Enables the use of certain services without worrying about incurring costs for the specified period
  • Three types are available, including:
    • Always Free - Examples are Lambda allowing one million requests and up to 3.2 million seconds of compute time, or DynamoDB allowing 25GB of free storage per month
    • 12 Months Free - S3 Standard Storage, thresholds for monthly hours of Amazon EC2 compute time, and amounts of Amazon CloudFront data transfer out
    • Trials - Short-term free trials start from the date of activation of a particular service. Amazon Inspector offers a 90-day free trial, and Lightsail provides 750 free hours of usage over 30 days

AWS Pricing Concepts

• How AWS Pricing Works
  • Pay for what you use - For each service, pay for exactly the amount of resources actually used
  • Pay less when you reserve - Discounts provided for when reserved over on-demand pricing
  • Pay less with volume-based discounts when you use more
• AWS Pricing Calculator - Allows exploration of AWS services and creates an estimate for the cost of use cases in AWS. Can be organized by defined groups, and a group can reflect how a company is organized.

Billing Dashboard

• Use the AWS Billing and Cost Management dashboard to pay AWS bills, monitor usage, and analyze and control costs, as well as obtain forecasts for future usage.

Consolidated Billing

• Consolidated Billing - Feature that enables the user to receive a single bill for all AWS accounts in the organization
  • Consolidation allows for easier tracking of combined costs
  • Allows the ability to share bulk discount pricing, Savings Plans, and Reserved Instances across accounts in the organization

AWS Budgets

• AWS Budgets - Allows the user to create budgets to plan service usage, service costs, and instance reservations
  • Updates three times a day and helps to accurately determine how close usage is to the budgeted amounts, or to the AWS Free Tier limits