Summary and Quiz

This lesson will summarize what we have learned about Billing and Cost Management Services. Also, we'll test our knowledge through a quiz.

Summary

Here is a summary of key takeaways from the Billing and Cost Management section:

• AWS Cost Explorer: It is an expansive AWS service for managing billing and cost details, encompassing several services that allow us to view bills, explore costs, set budgets, generate financial reports, make saving plans, detect cost anomalies for AWS, and much more.

• AWS Budgets: AWS Budgets help us plan and set up budgets to control AWS costs. We can use it to set up cost budgets, usage budgets, saving plans, and reservation budgets.

• AWS Saving Plans: It offers lower costs than On-Demand pricing for consistent AWS usage. It’s best suited for organizations with steady usage of certain AWS services. Here are some key features of the AWS Savings Plans service:

  • Payment options: AWS Savings Plans offers several payment options: “All Upfront,” “Partial Upfront,” and “No Upfront.”

  • Savings plan types: AWS Savings Plans offers plans for Compute services in general and more tailored plans for EC2 and SageMaker instances.

  • Commitment terms: AWS Savings Plans offers either a 1-year or 3-year term commitment.

• AWS Cost Anomaly Detection: It detects and alerts us on unusual AWS spending patterns. It uses machine learning to intially monitor our spending patterns to develop a baseline. Using this baseline, it continuously monitors costs and alerts us of cost anomalies.

• AWS Marketplace: It trades AWS native software and applications such as machine learning and data products. It offers built-in functionalities to easily upload and deploy the application on the marketplace through pre-configured AWS infrastructure, AMIs, or SaaS applications.

• AWS Pricing Calculator: It is a free web-based tool that allows us to estimate the expenditure on AWS services and identify cost-saving opportunities. It allows us to create multiple groups to organize and compare costs of different infrastructures or products.

• AWS Billing Conductor: It allows us to create customizable bills for multiple clients and customers. A pro forma bill contains the custom bill, including the discounts or saving plans that might apply to individual customers.

Test your knowledge

Solve the quiz below to test the concepts you learned in this chapter.