Billing and Support Services

Question 1

What is an Organizations and what is it used for?

Answer 1

Organizations offer policy-based management for multiple AWS accounts. With organizations, you can create groups of accounts and then apply policies to those groups.

Organizations can also be used to help automate the creation of new accounts through API’s and to simplify the billing for multiple accounts.

Question 2

What is a Service Control Policy?

Answer 2

Policies that centrally control AWS service use across multiple AWS accounts.

Question 3

What are the main features/benefits of Organizations?

Answer 3

1. Centrally manage access policies across multiple AWS accounts
2. Control access to AWS services
3. Automate AWS account creation and management
4. Consolidate billing across multiple AWS accounts

Question 4

What is consolidated billing?

Answer 4

Within Organizations, the ability to set a single payment method for all AWS accounts in your organization.

Question 5

What are the benefits of consolidated billing?

Answer 5

1. Central location to manage billing across all your AWS accounts
2. Take advantage of pricing benefits of aggregated usage (i.e. volume based discounts) across all your AWS accounts

Question 6

What are the four principles of how AWS pricing works?

Answer 6

1. Pay as you go: Only pay for what you use, when you are using it. No upfront costs and charges immediately end when you stop using a particular service or feature
2. No long term contracts or complex licensing
3. Volume based discounts are available
4. There are no termination fees
5. Free tier option is available to those new to AWS. Limited resources are available free for charge for 12 months

Question 7

What is the S3 pricing model?

Answer 7

1. How much data you store
   - Applies to data at rest in S3
   - Charged per GB stored (volume based discounts)
   - Price per GB varies by region and storage class
2. Request Pricing (Moving data in/out of S3)
   - PUT, POST, LIST, GET (API Request)
   - Lifecycle transitions request
   - Data retrieval, data archive, data restore

Question 8

What is the EC2 pricing model?

Answer 8

Charged per second (based on an hourly rate) for the amount of time the instance is running (applies to on-demand and spot instances). Reserved instances are in 1 or 3 year terms, regardless of use. Hourly rates depend on:

1. The purchasing option (On-demand, Spot, Reserved)
2. Instance type (AKA processing power)
3. AMI Type
   - Linux (price varies based on distro/software pkgs)
   - Windows (price varies based on version/software pkgs)
4. Region

NOTE: You are also charged for transferring data in/out of an instance on a per GB basis

Question 9

What is the TCO Calculator?

Answer 9

Total Cost of Ownership calculator: Free tool provided by AWS that allows yo to estimate the cost savings of using the AWS cloud vs using on-premises data center

Question 10

What are the main features/benefits of using the TCO Calculator?

Answer 10

1. By showing how much you can save using AWS, it helps to reduce the TCO by avoiding large capital expenditures on IT hardware and infrastructure
2. Can provide directional guidance on cost savings
3. Works by you inputting elements of your current or theoretical on-premises data center, and comparing those cost requirements to how much it would cost in AWS.
4. Elements can be added/modified as you move through the process to best estimate cost savings

Question 11

What is AWS Cost Explorer?

Answer 11

Free tool that allows you to view charts of your AWS costs

Question 12

What are the main features/benefits of using Cost Explorer?

Answer 12

1. View cost data for the last 13 months
2. Forecast how much you are likely to spend over the next three months
3. Discover patterns in how much you spend on AWS resources over time - and identify cost problem areas
4. Identify which services you use the most, and/or metrics like which availability zones have the most traffic, or which linked AWS account is used the most.

Question 13

What are the AWS support plans available and starting prices?

Answer 13

1. Basic: Included with any AWS account
2. Developer: Starts at $29/month
3. Business: $100/month
4. Enterprise: $15,000/month

Question 14

What is the support access associated with each support level?

Answer 14

Basic: No access to cloud support representative
Developer: Business hours email only access to a cloud support associate
Business: 24x7 access to a cloud support engineer
Enterprise: 24x7 access to a Sr cloud support engineer

Question 15

What is an AWS Trusted Advisor?

Answer 15

Online resource to help you reduce cost, increase performance, and increase security by optimizing your AWS environment. Provides real time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices

Question 16

What are the 5 Trusted Advisor Categories?

Answer 16

1. Cost Optimization
2. Performance
3. Security
4. Fault Tolerance
5. Service Limits

Question 17

How many Trusted Advisor “checks” come with each support plan?

Answer 17

Basic: 7 core checks
Developer: 7 core checks
Business: Full set of checks
Enterprise: Full set of checks

Question 18

What are the 7 core Trusted Advisor checks included in all support plans?

Answer 18

1. Security Groups (port checks)
2. IAM use
3. Is MFA enabled on the root user account
4. EBS public snapshots
5. RDS public snapshots
6. Service Limits
7. S3 Bucket Permissions

Question 19

What features of Trusted Advisor are only available to the business and enterprise support plans?

Answer 19

1. Notifications to stay up to date with your AWS resource deployment with weekly updates
2. Access to the full list of trusted advisor checks
3. Programmatic access to retrieve/refresh Trusted Advisor results via AWS support API

Question 20

What do you do if you think your AWS account has been compromised?

Answer 20

1. Change your AWS root account password
2. Change all IAM user’s passwords
3. Delete or rotate all programmatic access keys
4. Delete any resources in your account that you did not create
5. Respond to any notifications that you received from AWS through the AWS support center and/or contact AWS support to open a support case

Question 21

What are AWS white papers?

Answer 21

Collection of technical documents that outline many relevant AWS topics such as (but not limited to):

1. Architecture best practices
2. Security best practices
3. Cloud Computing economics
4. Serverless architecture

All white papers have been reviewed and approved by AWS, independent analysts, or the AWS community (customers or partners)

Question 22

What is AWS service documentation?

Answer 22

Collection of documents specific to each AWS service. Provide detailed technical explanations and walkthroughs on how to use each service and its features.