My Study Guide for AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam — (II) Pricing & Monitoring

This post is the Pricing Section of the study guide for the exam. As you plan and manage your AWS deployments, keeping costs within your organization’s budget is a critical aspect. In this post, you will understand how AWS bills its services, and how you can access and monitor the pricing information.

(1) 12-Months Free Tier

AWS offers a Free Tier for the first 12 months after opening a new account. The free tier offers are only available to new AWS customers (new e-mail address). Once the 1 free usage term expires or your application use exceeds the tiers, you pay at the pay-as-you-go service rates.

The free tier includes light implementations of most AWS services (the AWS Free Tier page), which is more than enough for most starters. You’re allowed to run one or multiple t2. micro Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instance — powered by either Linux or Windows — that total up to 750 hours per month. You can store up to 5 GB of data within Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets.

(Question) Which of the following EC2 services can be used without charge under the Free Tier?

(A) Any single EC2 instance type as long as it runs for less than one hour per day
(B) Any single EC2 instance type as long as it runs for…