Amazon EC2 Pricing Options

Question 1

On-Demand

Answer 1

• Standard rate
• No Discount
• No commitments
• dev/test
• short-term
• unpredictable workloads

Question 2

Spot Instances

Answer 2

• Low price for unused uncapacity
• up to 90% discount
• maybe terminated by AWS
• workloads w/ flexible start & end times

Question 3

Dedicated Hosts

Answer 3

• Physical server dedicated for your use
• Socket/core visibility
• host affinity
• pay per host
• workloads w/ server-bound software licenses.

Question 4

Reserved

Answer 4

• 1 or 3 year commitment
• up to 75% discount
• steady-state
• predictable workloads & reserved capacity

Question 5

Dedicated Instances

Answer 5

• Physical isolation at host hardware level from instances belonging to other customers
• pay per instance

Question 6

Savings Plans

Answer 6

Flexible pricing w/ commitment to set spend over time.

Question 7

What are Standard Reserved Instances (RI)?

Answer 7

• Change Availability Zone (AZ), instance size, & networking type
• Use ModifyReservedInstances API

Question 8

What are Convertible RIs

Answer 8

You can change following:
- Availability Zone (AZ)
- Instance Size
- Networking Type
- Family
- OS
- tenancy
- payment option

Use ExchangeReservedInstances API

Question 9

When is discount applied to Reserved Instance?

Answer 9

When attributes of used instance match attributes of an RI

Question 10

What are Amazon EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations?

Answer 10

• Reserve compute capacity for your Amazon EC2 instances in specific Availability Zone (AZ).
• Any duration can be specified
• Mitigates against risk of being unable to get On-Demand capacity.
• Doesn’t require any term commitments & can be cancelled at any time.

Question 11

What do you specifiy when creating Capacity Reservation?

Answer 11

• Availability Zone
• Number of Instances
• Instance attributes, including instance type, tenancy, platform/OS

Question 12

What are Capacity Blocks for ML?

Answer 12

• ML model training & fine-tuning - Get uninterrupted access to GPU instances that you reserved to complete ML model training & fine-tuning.
• ML experiments & prototypes - run experiments & build prototypes that require GPU instances for short durations.

Question 13

What are AWS Savings Plans?

Answer 13

• Compute Savings Plans - 1/3 year commitment to usage of EC2, Fargate, Lambda
• EC2 Instance Savings Plan - 1/3 year; commitment to usage of Amazon EC2 instances on specific instance family in specific AWS region
• Machine Learning Savings - 1/3 year; commitment to usage of Amazon SageMaker

Question 14

What are EC2 Spot Instances?

Answer 14

• Spot Instance - 1 or more EC2 instances
• Spot Fleet - launches /maintains number of Spot/On-Demand instances to meet specified target capacity.
• EC2 Fleet - launches/maintains specified number of Spot/On-Demand/Reserved instances in single API call

Question 15

What can you also define with EC2 spot instances?

Answer 15

Can define:
- seperate On-Demand/Spot capacity
- targets
- Spot price
- instance types
- Availbility Zones (AZs)

Question 16

What are characteristics of Dedicated Instances?

Answer 16

• Enables use of dedicated physical servers
• Per instance billing ($2 per region fee)
• Automatic instance placement

Question 17

What are characteristics of Dedicated Hosts?

Answer 17

• Enables use of dedicated physical servers
• Per host billing
• Visibility of sockets, cores, host ID
• Affinity b/w host & instance
• Targeted instance placement
• Automatic instance placement
• Add capacity using allocation request

Question 18

What would be use-case for:
- Developer working on small project for several hours; cannot be interrupted.

Answer 18

On-Demand

Question 19

What would be use-case for:
- Compute-instensive, cost-sensitive distributed computing; can withstand interruption

Answer 19

Spot Instances

Question 20

What would be use-case for:
- Steady-state, business critical, line-of-business application; continuous demand

Answer 20

Reserved Instance

Question 21

What would be use-case for:
- Need to Guarentee capacity is available in specific AZ

Answer 21

Capacity Reservation

Question 22

What would be use-case for:
- Database w/ per-socket licensing

Answer 22

Dedicated Hosts

Question 23

What would be use-case for:
- Security-sensitive application
- requires dedicated hardware
- per-instance billing

Answer 23

Dedicated Instances