AWS Billing, Pricing, and Cost Management

Question 1

Which AWS pricing model allows you to commit to a consistent amount of compute usage (measured in $/hour) for a 1- or 3-year term in exchange for a discount of up to 66% compared to On-Demand pricing?

Accepted Answer

Savings Plans

Answer

Savings Plans offer flexible discounts (up to 66%) in exchange for a commitment to a consistent dollar-per-hour spend over 1 or 3 years. Unlike Reserved Instances, Savings Plans automatically apply to any eligible compute usage (EC2, Fargate, Lambda) regardless of instance family or region.

Question 2

A company wants to receive an alert when its monthly AWS bill exceeds $500. Which AWS service should they use?

Accepted Answer

AWS Budgets

Answer

AWS Budgets lets you set custom cost, usage, or reservation budgets and triggers SNS/email alerts when thresholds are breached. Cost Explorer is for analyzing historical spend, the Pricing Calculator estimates future costs, and Trusted Advisor provides general best-practice recommendations.

Question 3

Which EC2 purchasing option is most appropriate for a fault-tolerant, stateless batch processing workload that can be interrupted and resumed, where minimizing cost is the top priority?

Accepted Answer

Spot Instances

Answer

Spot Instances use spare EC2 capacity and can be up to 90% cheaper than On-Demand, but can be interrupted with a 2-minute warning. They are ideal for stateless, fault-tolerant workloads like batch jobs that can checkpoint and resume.

Question 4

What is the purpose of the AWS Free Tier's '12 months free' category?

Accepted Answer

Services free for the first 12 months following your initial AWS account sign-up date

Answer

'12 months free' services (e.g., 750 hours/month of t2.micro EC2, 5 GB of S3 Standard storage) are available at no charge for the first 12 months after you create your AWS account. After that period, standard pay-as-you-go rates apply.

Question 5

Which AWS tool provides an interactive, graphical interface to visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time, including forecasting future spend?

Accepted Answer

AWS Cost Explorer

Answer

AWS Cost Explorer is the purpose-built tool for exploring, filtering, and graphing historical cost and usage data. It also provides a 12-month forecast. The CUR provides raw granular billing data, Budgets sets alerts, and the Billing Dashboard is a high-level summary.

AWS Practice Test

AWS Practice Test

AWS Billing, Pricing, and Cost Management