Section 4.1 - AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Study Guide

This series is intended to be a personal study guide. Information may not be comprehensive or accurate. I am sharing it in case others find it useful. Please feel free to comment if any information is inaccurate.

Return to Exam Guide

4.1 Compare and contrast the various pricing models for AWS (for example, On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances, and Spot Instance pricing)

Selecting the Best Pricing Model

• Identify scenarios/best fit for On-Demand Instance pricing
  • Short term workloads
  • Workloads that spike periodically
  • Unpredictable workloads that can't be interrupted
  • Pre-production workloads that can't be interrupted but aren't long enough for discounts
• Identify scenarios/best fit for Reserved-Instance pricing
  • Describe Reserved-Instances flexibility
    • Discounts up to 72% for commitment to a minimum of resources
    • Available for RDS, Elasticsearch, ElastiCache, Amazon Redshift, and DynamoDB
    • Pricing options of no upfront, partial upfront, and all upfront
    • Terms of one or three years
    • Can be purchased in a Region or a specific Availability Zone
  • Describe Reserved-Instances behavior in AWS Organizations
    • Reference documentation
    • AWS Organizations treats all the accounts in the organization as one account
    • All accounts in the organization can receive the hourly cost benefit of Reserved Instances that are purchased by any other account
• Identify scenarios/best fit for Spot Instance pricing
  • Uses unused EC2 compute capacity
  • Can be combined with On-Demand and Reserved Instances to optimize savings
  • Discounts of up to 90% off On-Demand prices with no long-term commitment required
  • Can be interrupted with a 2-minute warning if EC2 needs the capacity back, or the Spot Instance price exceeds your configured price
  • Ideal for:
    • Workloads where there is a queue or buffer in place
    • Workloads with multiple resources working independently to process the requests
    • Workloads that are fault-tolerant, stateless, and flexible
    • Non-critical workloads such as test and development environments

Return to Exam Guide