Account Management, Billing & Support

AWS Organizations, Pricing, Cost Tools & Support Plans

AWS Organizations

Global service to manage multiple AWS accounts from a central location.
The main account is the management account (formerly master account). All others are member accounts.
A member account can only belong to one organization.

Key Benefits

Consolidated Billing — Single payment method for all accounts. One bill.
Volume Pricing Discounts — Aggregated usage across all accounts for better pricing tiers (e.g., S3, EC2).
Reserved Instance Sharing — Reserved Instances and Savings Plans can be shared across accounts in the organization.
Automated Account Creation — Create new AWS accounts via API.

Organizational Units (OUs)

Organize accounts into groups called OUs (e.g., Dev OU, Prod OU, Finance OU).
OUs can be nested (OUs within OUs).
Policies applied to an OU apply to all accounts within it.

Service Control Policies (SCPs)

IAM-like policies applied at the OU or account level to restrict what services and actions are available.
Do NOT grant permissions — they only restrict. Users still need IAM permissions.
Apply to all users and roles in the account, including the root user.
Do NOT affect the management account (it's always unrestricted).
Must have an explicit Allow (default is deny if SCP blocks it).

Exam Tip:

SCPs restrict permissions — they don't grant them. They affect even the root user of member accounts. The management account is never affected by SCPs.

AWS Control Tower

Easy way to set up and govern a secure, multi-account AWS environment based on best practices.
Automates account creation and setup using Account Factory.
Creates a Landing Zone — a well-architected multi-account baseline.

Guardrails

Preventive Guardrails — Uses SCPs to prevent actions (e.g., restrict creating new regions).
Detective Guardrails — Uses AWS Config to detect non-compliance (e.g., detect untagged resources).

Key Point:

Control Tower = automated, best-practice multi-account setup. Guardrails = preventive (SCP) + detective (Config).

AWS Pricing Models

Pricing Model	Description
Pay-as-you-go	Pay for what you use, no long-term commitments. Most flexible.
Save when you reserve	Reserve capacity for 1 or 3 years for significant discounts (up to 72%). Applies to EC2, RDS, ElastiCache, Redshift, DynamoDB.
Pay less per unit at volume	Volume-based discounts: the more you use, the less you pay per unit (e.g., S3 storage tiers).
Pay less as AWS grows	AWS passes savings to customers as they grow and optimize infrastructure.

AWS Free Tier

Always Free — Offers that do not expire (e.g., Lambda 1M free requests/month, DynamoDB 25GB).
12 Months Free — Free for 12 months from account creation (e.g., EC2 t2.micro 750hrs/month, S3 5GB, RDS 750hrs/month).
Trials — Short-term free trials for specific services (e.g., SageMaker, Redshift, Inspector).

Service Pricing Details

Amazon EC2 Pricing

Option	Discount	Details
On-Demand	None (full price)	Pay per second (Linux/Windows) or per hour. No commitment.
Reserved (1 or 3 yr)	Up to 72%	Commit to specific instance type, region, tenancy, OS. Upfront payment options.
Savings Plans	Up to 72%	Commit to $ amount of usage per hour for 1 or 3 years. More flexible than RI.
Spot Instances	Up to 90%	Bid for unused capacity. Can be interrupted with 2-min warning. Best for fault-tolerant workloads.
Dedicated Hosts	On-Demand or Reserved	Physical server dedicated to you. For licensing or compliance requirements.

AWS Lambda Pricing

Pay per call — First 1 million requests free, then $0.20 per 1 million requests.
Pay per duration — First 400,000 GB-seconds free, then $1.00 per 600,000 GB-seconds.

Amazon S3 Pricing

Pay per GB stored per month (varies by storage class).
Pay per number of requests (PUT, GET, LIST, etc.).
Pay for data transfer OUT of S3. Data IN is free.
S3 Transfer Acceleration has additional charges.

Amazon EBS Pricing

Pay per GB provisioned per month (even if not fully used).
Pay for snapshots (per GB/month of data stored).
Pay for data transfer between AZs.

Amazon RDS Pricing

Per hour billing based on instance type.
Pay per provisioned storage (GB/month).
Number and type of input/output requests.
Data transfer OUT charged, inbound is free.
Reserved instances available for 1 or 3 years.

Amazon CloudFront Pricing

Pay per data transfer OUT to the internet (varies by edge location).
Pay per number of HTTP/HTTPS requests.
Data transfer from CloudFront to origin (S3, ALB, etc.) is free.

Exam Tip:

Data transfer IN to AWS is always free. Data transfer OUT is charged. Data transfer between AZs costs money. Data transfer within the same AZ via private IP is free.

Cost Management Tools

AWS Pricing Calculator

Estimate the cost of your AWS architecture before you build it.
Available at calculator.aws.
Model your solutions and get a cost breakdown.

AWS Billing Dashboard

High-level overview of your charges for the current month.
Shows month-to-date spend and forecasted end-of-month charges.

AWS Cost Explorer

Visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time.
Create custom reports with filters and groupings.
Forecast future costs up to 12 months.
Provides Savings Plan recommendations to reduce costs.
Can analyze at hourly, daily, or monthly level.

AWS Budgets

Create budgets and receive alerts when costs or usage exceed (or are forecasted to exceed) your budget.
4 types of budgets:

Budget Type	Description
Usage Budget	Track usage of a specific service (e.g., EC2 hours).
Cost Budget	Track overall cost against a dollar amount.
Reservation Budget	Track Reserved Instance utilization.
Savings Plans Budget	Track Savings Plans utilization.

Up to 5 SNS notifications per budget.
Can trigger actions: apply IAM policy, apply SCP, stop EC2/RDS instances.
First 2 budgets are free; $0.02/day per additional budget.

AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR)

The most comprehensive and detailed cost and usage data available.
Contains hourly line items for each service, usage type, and operation.
Can be integrated with Athena, Redshift, or QuickSight for analysis.
Published to S3 bucket.

Cost Allocation Tags

Tag resources to track costs by project, team, department, environment.
AWS-generated tags — Automatically applied (e.g., aws:createdBy).
User-defined tags — Custom tags you create (e.g., user:Department, user:Project).
Must be activated in the Billing console to appear in cost reports.

AWS Compute Optimizer

Uses ML to analyze resource utilization and recommend optimal AWS resources.
Supports: EC2, EC2 Auto Scaling Groups, EBS volumes, Lambda functions.
Reduces costs by up to 25% by right-sizing.
Recommends optimal instance types based on utilization data.

Key Point:

Pricing Calculator = estimate before building. Cost Explorer = visualize past costs + forecast. Budgets = alerts when exceeding. CUR = most detailed report. Compute Optimizer = right-sizing ML recommendations.

AWS Support Plans

Feature	Basic	Developer	Business	Enterprise On-Ramp	Enterprise
Cost	Free	$29+/month	$100+/month	$5,500+/month	$15,000+/month
Tech Support	None (docs, forums only)	Business hours email	24/7 phone, email, chat	24/7 phone, email, chat	24/7 phone, email, chat
Who Can Open Cases	N/A	1 primary contact	Unlimited contacts	Unlimited contacts	Unlimited contacts
Response: General	N/A	24 business hours	24 hours	24 hours	24 hours
Response: System Impaired	N/A	12 business hours	12 hours	12 hours	12 hours
Response: Production Down	N/A	N/A	< 4 hours	< 4 hours	< 4 hours
Response: Production Critical	N/A	N/A	< 1 hour	< 1 hour	< 1 hour
Response: Business Critical	N/A	N/A	N/A	< 30 minutes	< 15 minutes
TAM	No	No	No	Pool of TAMs	Designated TAM
Concierge	No	No	No	No	Yes
Trusted Advisor	7 core checks	7 core checks	Full set of checks	Full set of checks	Full set of checks
Infrastructure Event Mgmt	No	No	For extra fee	1 per year	Included

Exam Tip:

TAM (Technical Account Manager) = Enterprise On-Ramp (pool) and Enterprise (dedicated). Concierge = Enterprise only. Full Trusted Advisor = Business and above. Business-critical response < 15 min = Enterprise only.

AWS Marketplace

Digital catalog with thousands of third-party software listings that run on AWS.
Buy or sell software: AMIs, CloudFormation templates, SaaS, containers.
Examples: custom AMIs (OS, firewalls, security), SaaS offerings, data products.
Purchases show up on your AWS bill (consolidated billing).
Can sell your own solutions on the Marketplace.