Covers AWS support plans and pricing, the free tier and always-free services, billing/cost-management tooling (Budgets, Cost Explorer, Cost & Usage Reports, billing alarms), consolidated billing, Trusted Advisor, SLAs, health dashboards, abuse reporting, Marketplace, the Partner Network, and Savings Plans.

Always-Free Services

  • Services free forever (unlike the 12-month free tier): IAM, Amazon VPC, Auto Scaling, CloudFormation, Elastic Beanstalk, OpsWorks, Amplify, AppSync, Organizations, Consolidated Billing, Cost Explorer, SageMaker (console), Systems Manager, and more 11:47:59
  • Caveat: the free service itself may provision resources that cost money — e.g. CloudFormation launching EC2 instances, OpsWorks launching servers, Amplify launching Lambdas 11:48:28

Support Plans (must know inside-out for the exam)

  • Four tiers: Basic, Developer, Business, Enterprise 11:49:01
  • Basic: email support only, for billing and account questions. If you get overbilled by a misconfiguration, open a billing ticket — AWS is likely to refund you 11:49:01
  • Email tech support (Developer+): reply roughly within 24 business hours 11:49:29
  • Third-party software support: available on Business and Enterprise, NOT on Developer 11:49:56
  • Phone/chat support: Business and Enterprise only 11:49:56
  • Response time SLAs 11:50:52:
    • General guidance: ≤ 24 h (all paid tiers)
    • System impaired: ≤ 12 h (Developer/Business/Enterprise)
    • Production system impaired: ≤ 4 h (Business/Enterprise)
    • Production system down: ≤ 1 h (Business/Enterprise)
    • Business-critical system down: < 15 min (Enterprise only)
  • Enterprise extras: Concierge team + a TAM (Technical Account Manager) assigned to your org 11:51:24
  • Trusted Advisor checks: 7 checks on Basic/Developer; ALL checks on Business/Enterprise 11:51:51
  • Pricing: Basic $0, Developer from $29/mo, Business from $100/mo, Enterprise $15,000/mo — "from" because it scales with usage; exam only tests the tier of expensiveness, not formulas 11:51:51 11:52:17
  • Cost math examples: Developer = greater of $29 or 3% of monthly spend (e.g. $1,000 spend → $30); Business is bracketed (10% of first $10k, 7% of next, so $12k spend → $1,140) 11:52:45 11:53:12

Technical Account Manager (TAM)

  • Provides both proactive guidance and reactive support: builds solutions, technical guidance, customer advocacy, keeps environments operationally healthy while reducing cost/complexity, consults from developers to C-suite 11:53:47 11:54:22
  • TAMs follow the Amazon Leadership Principles (customer obsession); only available at the Enterprise support tier 11:55:00

Using AWS Support (follow-along)

  • IAM users can use support, but changing the support plan requires the root user 11:55:31
  • Case types: account & billing support, service limit increase (e.g. more EC2, more SES email volume — common early in an account's life), and technical support (grayed out on Basic) 11:56:00
  • On Business you get web/chat/phone; phone callbacks usually within ~15 min; support can also screen-share (Zoom or similar) to help hands-on 11:59:20 12:02:04
  • Downgrading mid-month: you're obligated to pay a minimum of 30 days of support each time you register 12:02:24

AWS Marketplace

  • Curated digital catalog of thousands of software listings from independent software vendors (ISVs); products can be free or paid — charges appear on your AWS bill and AWS pays the provider 12:02:44
  • Product formats: AMIs, CloudFormation templates, SaaS offerings, web ACLs / AWS WAF rules 12:03:18
  • Integrated into services (e.g. the EC2 launch wizard's marketplace section) and also a standalone page; supports bring-your-own-license products (e.g. firewalls) 12:03:41 12:04:23

Consolidated Billing & Volume Discounts

  • A feature of AWS Organizations: pay for multiple accounts with one bill; one master/root account pays the charges for all member accounts; offered at no additional cost 12:05:03 12:05:26
  • Use Cost Explorer to visualize consolidated usage; an account leaving the organization must attach its own payment method 12:05:52
  • Volume discounts ("the more you use, the more you save"): combined usage across all org accounts shares pricing-tier discounts — requires Organizations 12:06:30
  • Example: data transfer billed tiered (first 10 TB at $0.17/GB, next 40 TB at $0.13/GB); consolidating two accounts (4 TB + 8 TB) saves ~$80/mo vs unconsolidated bills 12:06:30 12:07:32

AWS Trusted Advisor

  • Recommendation tool that automatically and actively monitors your account — think "automated checklist of best practices", roughly mapping to the Well-Architected pillars 12:08:06
  • Five categories: Cost Optimization, Performance, Security, Fault Tolerance, Service Limits 12:08:50
  • Basic/Developer: 7 checks; Business/Enterprise: all checks 12:09:21
  • The free checks: MFA on root account, security groups (unrestricted ports), S3 bucket permissions, EBS public snapshots, RDS public snapshots, IAM use, plus ALL service-limit checks — the six named ones are all security checks 12:09:21 12:09:49
  • Example checks per category: idle load balancers / unassociated Elastic IPs (cost), high-utilization EC2 (performance), MFA on root & key rotation (security), RDS backups enabled (fault tolerance), VPC/EC2 limits (service limits) 12:10:19
  • Demo: a public S3 bucket (public ACL + public-read bucket policy) triggers a yellow warning check after a delay; you can set alert recipients (e.g. email security contacts) 12:14:48 12:15:02

Service Level Agreements (SLA / SLI / SLO)

  • SLA: formal commitment on expected service level between customer and provider; if unmet (and customer meets obligations), customer is eligible for compensation — financial or service credits 12:15:55
  • SLI (Service Level Indicator): the metric measured — uptime, performance, availability, throughput, latency, error rate, durability, correctness 12:15:55 12:16:20
  • SLO (Service Level Objective): the target the provider agreed to meet, expressed as a target percentage over a period (e.g. 99.99% availability over 3 months) 12:16:20
  • Jargon: "nine nines" = 99.9999999%; common targets are 99.95% and 99.99% 12:16:49
  • Examples (exam won't ask exact numbers): DynamoDB — 99.999% with global tables SLA, 99.99% standard; missing it yields service credits (10% back down to 99.0%, 25% back down to 95.0%, 100% back below 95%) 12:17:24 12:18:20
  • Compute SLA spans EC2, EBS, ECS, EKS with a region-level and an instance-level commitment; RDS multi-AZ commits to 99.95% monthly uptime — SLAs vary per service, look each one up 12:18:51 12:19:24 12:19:55

Health Dashboards

  • Service Health Dashboard: general status of AWS services by geographic area, with RSS feed 12:20:48
  • Personal Health Dashboard: alerts and guidance for AWS events that affect your environment; available to all customers; shows recent/active events and proactive notifications for scheduled activities 12:21:17

AWS Abuse (Trust & Safety team)

  • Report abuse to the AWS Trust & Safety team, not regular support, when AWS-owned IPs/resources are involved in: spam, port scanning, DoS/DDoS attacks, intrusion attempts, hosting prohibited/copyrighted content, or distributing malware 12:22:14 12:22:43 12:23:05
  • Contact abuse@amazonaws.com or fill in the abuse report form — applies whether the abuse comes from an outside account or your own compromised account 12:23:32

AWS Free Tier

  • Three kinds of "free": 12-month free tier offers, always-free monthly limits, and inherently free services 12:24:21
  • Highlights 12:24:49 12:25:19 12:25:50 12:26:18 12:26:42:
    • EC2: t2.micro 750 h/mo for 1 year (~730 h in a month = one server running all month free)
    • RDS (MySQL/Postgres): db.t2.micro 750 h/mo for 1 year
    • ELB: 750 h/mo for 1 year (load balancers normally ~$15/mo)
    • CloudFront: 50 GB data transfer out for 1 year
    • Amazon Connect: toll-free number, 90 min call time/mo for 1 year
    • ElastiCache: cache.t3.micro 750 h/mo for 1 year; Elasticsearch Service 750 h/mo for 1 year
    • Pinpoint: 5,000 targeted users/mo for 1 year
    • SES: 62,000 emails/mo forever; CodePipeline: 1 pipeline free; CodeBuild: 100 build min/mo forever
    • Lambda: 1M free requests/mo + 3.2M seconds of compute/mo forever

Promotional Credits

  • Equivalent to USD on the platform; earned via AWS Activate startup program, hackathons, surveys, etc.; redeemed in the billing console 12:27:32
  • Generally have an expiry date (a few months to a year); usable for most services, but NOT for things with external costs like purchasing a Route 53 domain 12:27:55

AWS Partner Network (APN)

  • Global partner program; join as a consulting partner (help companies use AWS) or a technology partner (build services on AWS); tiers: Select, Advanced, Premier 12:28:18
  • Free to sign up, but tiers require an annual fee (starting in the thousands) plus knowledge requirements (AWS certifications, APN-exclusive certifications) 12:28:46 12:29:09
  • Benefits: promotional AWS credits back, speaking opportunities in AWS marketing channels, and APN membership is required to sponsor a vendor booth at AWS events (e.g. re:Invent) 12:29:42 12:30:13

AWS Budgets & Budget Reports

  • Alerts when you exceed (or approach) a defined budget; cost, usage, or reservation budgets; monthly/quarterly/yearly tracking with custom start/end dates; reservation alerts support EC2, RDS, Redshift, ElastiCache 12:30:54
  • Can budget by dollar amount or by usage unit (e.g. EC2 running hours); notification via email or chatbot at a threshold of current or forecasted spend 12:31:23 12:31:53
  • First two budgets are free, then $0.02/day ($0.60/mo) per budget; limit of 20,000 budgets — no reason not to set one on a new account 12:32:17
  • Budget Reports: daily/weekly/monthly emailed reports on budget performance, so you don't have to log into the console 12:32:34

Cost & Usage Reports (CUR) and Cost Allocation Tags

  • CUR generates a detailed spreadsheet delivered to an S3 bucket; analyze via Athena (queryable), QuickSight (BI visualization, similar to Tableau/PowerBI), or Redshift 12:32:58 12:33:24
  • Granularity: hourly, daily, or monthly; output as zipped CSV or Parquet; "cost allocation reports" is the old name for CUR 12:33:24 12:33:50 12:34:34
  • Cost allocation tags: optional metadata attached to resources for cost analysis; two types — user-defined and AWS-generated — and you must activate the tags you want in reports 12:34:14

Billing Alarms (CloudWatch)

  • A regular CloudWatch alarm focused on spend; you must enable billing alerts first, then choose Billing as the metric 12:34:34
  • More flexible than AWS Budgets — ideal for complex spend/usage alerting use cases; both options are valid 12:35:08

AWS Cost Explorer

  • Visualize, understand, and manage AWS cost and usage over time: time ranges, monthly/daily aggregation, robust filtering (e.g. EC2 in a specific region), default reports (monthly cost by service / linked account, RI utilization), custom saved reports, and forecasting 12:35:49 12:36:09 12:36:35
  • Cost Explorer lives in us-east-1 12:36:35
  • Tip: the Bills page in the billing dashboard itemizes every single service you're billed for — useful in a different way than Cost Explorer 12:38:41

AWS Pricing API

  • Programmatic access to current price offerings; two versions: the Query API (Price List Service API, JSON requests via e.g. Postman) and the Batch API (Price List API via HTML URLs — pasteable in a browser, returns JSON) 12:39:10 12:39:43
  • Subscribe to SNS notifications for price change alerts (price cuts, new instance types, new services) 12:40:08

Savings Plans (follow-along)

  • Found under Cost Explorer; commit for 1 or 3 years; three types: Compute (EC2, Fargate, Lambda), EC2 Instance (specific instance family), and SageMaker savings plans 12:40:29
  • Easiest workflow: use the recommendations panel (based on your past 30 days of spend) — e.g. a 1-year all-upfront compute plan showing $25.36/mo savings — then add to cart and submit the order 12:41:17 12:42:22