Cost optimization and billing management
1. What is the difference between On-Demand and Reserved instances in AWS?
On-Demand instances allow you to pay for compute capacity by the hour with no long-term commitments, while Reserved instances provide you with a significant discount compared to On-Demand pricing, in exchange for a one-time payment for a one or three year commitment.
2. Can you explain how the AWS Free Tier works?
The AWS Free Tier provides new customers with a limited number of free services for a one-year period. These services include a certain amount of computing, storage, and data transfer each month, among others.
3. How do you monitor and control the costs in AWS?
Costs in AWS can be monitored and controlled by using AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, and the AWS Cost and Usage report. Additionally, you can use tags and resource groups to organize and track your resources, and set up alerts and automatic actions based on your cost thresholds.
4. How can you optimize the storage costs in AWS?
You can optimize storage costs in AWS by using the right storage class for your data, using lifecycle policies to automatically transition data to lower-cost storage classes over time, using Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering, and regularly reviewing and deleting unused data.
5. How do you monitor and manage data transfer costs in AWS?
You can monitor and manage data transfer costs in AWS by using the AWS Cost and Usage Report, tracking data transfer costs by service, tracking data transfer costs by region, and optimizing data transfer through techniques such as Amazon CloudFront and Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration.
6. How does the AWS Trusted Advisor service help in cost optimization?
AWS Trusted Advisor is a service that helps you optimize costs by providing recommendations on cost-saving opportunities, such as underutilized Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon S3 buckets that allow public access, and unattached Elastic IP addresses.
7. Can you explain the difference between an AWS region and an availability zone?
An AWS region is a physical location in the world where AWS provides multiple, isolated locations called Availability Zones (AZs). An Availability Zone is a distinct location within an AWS region that is engineered to be isolated from failures in other Availability Zones and provides inexpensive, low-latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same region.
8. Can you discuss the benefits of using Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling?
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling helps to optimize costs by automatically scaling your Amazon EC2 instances up or down based on demand, and by providing you with the ability to scale based on a schedule. This helps you to only pay for the compute resources that you actually need, and helps you to avoid the cost of having underutilized or overutilized instances.
9. Can you explain how the AWS Cost Allocation Tag works?
The AWS Cost Allocation Tag is a way to tag your AWS resources and then use that information to track your costs. You can apply tags to your AWS resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon S3 buckets, and Amazon RDS DB instances, to categorize them based on specific criteria. AWS will then use these tags to produce a cost allocation report that breaks down your costs by each tag value.
10. How can you reduce data transfer costs between AWS regions?
You can reduce data transfer costs between AWS regions by compressing data before transfer, caching data at the edge with Amazon CloudFront, and using Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration. Additionally, you can use Amazon Direct Connect to establish a dedicated network connection between your data center and AWS, and AWS Global Accelerator to optimize the performance of your applications by routing traffic to the optimal AWS region for your users.
