Tiered pricing concepts - Amazon Web Services (AWS) Tutorial

- One of the terms used at AWS when they're talking about pricing is tiered pricing. Let's explain. Many AWS services will have a first tier price. That is you're going to use a certain amount of compute or storage or network transfer, and there'll be a price for that, and it might even be a free tier to start off, but once you send a certain amount of information out across the network or store resources or use a certain amount of compute, you can get to a second or third tier, and there will be a smaller charge. So the charges have a decreasing price point. Therefore, the more you spend, the more you save, but you have to get up to those higher tiers to save. Let's look at an example. Amazon S3 standard storage, unlimited storage in the cloud. The first 50 terabytes stored per month is charged at a certain rate. The figure doesn't really matter when you're watching this movie. It might be a little less, it might be a little more. It's a gigabyte charge per month. Once you store more than 50 terabytes per month, the next 450 terabyte stored is a little less per gigabyte. Sliding scales. Amazon CloudFront is their CDN. You're probably using this if you have a production application and thousands of users. Therefore, the first one terabyte of data transfer out from the CDN is free. After that, you'll get a charge. The first 10 million HTTPS requests for data from the cache, those are free. The first 2 million CloudFront function executions are free. What's a function? Well, a function is a script. Something that you write that can carry out a custom task based on requests for data from CloudFront. It can be very powerful, but as you execute those functions, eventually you're going to get charged for carrying out those tasks. Amazon CloudTrail is a service that tracks everything that's going on in your AWS account. If you think of it, they need CloudTrail to be able to figure out what you've done so they can charge you, but it's also a very useful audit trail. Therefore, you can review, search and download the 90 day history of your account. No charge, that's free, it's enabled. But if you want this information to be stored forever, well then we get into charges and they're going to charge you 75 cents per gigabyte per year at this point in time. That's been a pretty standard fee. But notice this is a yearly storage charge for the management and data events that have been carried out in your AWS account. Management would be running tasks using the command line or the management console. And data events are things that are being executed in your account. We also have a monitoring service called Amazon CloudWatch. You're probably going to use this. The first 10,000 custom metrics that are enabled are going to be charged 30 cents monthly. An example of a metric could be your analyzing the CPU utilization of a server. So the metrics that you enable are going to be charged at a certain rate up to the first 10,000. The next 240,000 metrics are charged much less. Again, a sliding scale. There's some stuff that's always free. If you're using a no SQL database, Amazon DynamoDB up to 200 million queries and 25 gigabytes of storage per month before you start getting charged. If you're storing objects in Glacier the archive, you can still retrieve up to 10 gigabyte of data with standard retrievals per month using the Glacier API. If you're creating custom functions using AWS Lambda, 3.2 million seconds of compute power per month before you get charged. So there's some baselines to consider. And tiered pricing is usually involved when you're looking at your cloud costs.