📋 Pricing and Billing Cheat Sheet

A practical CLF-C02 reference for AWS pricing models, billing tools, and cost-control resources.

Pricing Basics

  • AWS pricing follows pay-as-you-go for most services.
  • The AWS Free Tier includes free trials, 12-month offers, and always-free offers.
  • Pricing varies by service, Region, usage dimension, and commitment model.
  • The AWS Pricing Calculator estimates architecture cost before deployment.

Cost Tools

  • Cost Explorer analyzes historical spend and forecasts future spend.
  • AWS Budgets sends alerts when cost or usage crosses thresholds.
  • Cost and Usage Reports provide the most detailed billing data.
  • Cost allocation tags help categorize spend by project, team, or environment.
  • AWS Organizations supports consolidated billing across accounts.

Discount Options

  • Savings Plans discount eligible compute usage in exchange for a spend commitment.
  • Reserved Instances discount specific EC2, RDS, and other reserved capacity use cases.
  • Spot Instances use spare EC2 capacity and can be interrupted.
  • S3 lifecycle policies can lower storage cost by moving data to cheaper classes.

Practice Pricing & Billing Questions

Put your knowledge to the test with practice questions.

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