Cost Management & AWS Tools
Difficulty: easy
Overview
AWS provides tools to monitor, analyze, forecast, and optimize cloud spending.
Cost Analysis & Forecasting:
- AWS Cost Explorer — Visual dashboard to explore and analyze historical and forecasted costs. Filter by service, region, tag, account. Free to use.
- AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) — The most detailed billing data available; CSV files delivered to S3; hourly, daily, or monthly granularity. Used for deep analytics.
- AWS Pricing Calculator — Estimate monthly costs for planned AWS architectures before deploying. No account needed.
Cost Control:
- AWS Budgets — Set custom cost, usage, and reservation budgets. Receive SNS/email alerts when thresholds are approached or exceeded. Can set action-based budgets to apply IAM policies or stop EC2 instances.
- Cost Allocation Tags — Key-value labels attached to AWS resources; enable cost tracking by project, team, or environment in Cost Explorer and CUR.
Optimization Recommendations:
- AWS Trusted Advisor — Automated checks across 5 categories: Cost Optimization, Performance, Security, Fault Tolerance, Service Limits. All checks available on Business/Enterprise plans; limited checks on Basic/Developer.
- AWS Compute Optimizer — ML-based recommendations to right-size EC2 instances, Lambda functions, EBS volumes, and ECS on Fargate based on actual utilization metrics.
Governance & Monitoring:
- AWS Health Dashboard — Personalized service health events impacting your specific resources. Service Health and Account Health views.
- AWS Config — Tracks resource configuration history; evaluates against compliance rules.
- AWS Well-Architected Tool — Free review of workloads against the 6 pillars; identifies improvement areas.
AWS Organizations:
- Consolidated billing aggregates usage across accounts for volume discounts.
- SCPs enforce permission guardrails.
- Central policy management.
Practice Linked Questions
Q1. Which AWS service provides a visual dashboard to explore, analyze, and understand your AWS costs and usage over time, with filtering by service, account, and tags?
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Q2. Which AWS service lets you set custom cost and usage thresholds and automatically send alerts when those thresholds are breached or forecasted to be breached?
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Q3. Which AWS tool provides the MOST granular billing data, including hourly resource-level costs, and delivers it as CSV files to an S3 bucket for deep analytics?
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Q4. Which AWS service uses machine learning to analyze actual resource utilization and recommends right-sizing actions for EC2 instances, Lambda functions, and EBS volumes?
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Q5. AWS Trusted Advisor provides recommendations across which five categories?
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Q6. What is the purpose of cost allocation tags in AWS?
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Q7. Which AWS service provides personalized information about AWS service events — including outages and scheduled maintenance — that may specifically impact your account's resources?
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Q8. A company has multiple teams using the same AWS account and wants to track costs separately by team and alert each team when their spending exceeds $1,000/month. Which combination achieves this?
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Q9. A company's developers only run EC2 instances during business hours (Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm). What is the MOST cost-effective approach for these non-production instances?
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Q10. Which TWO AWS services provide cost optimization recommendations that help identify savings opportunities in your current AWS environment? (Select TWO — more than one answer may be correct)
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Q11. What is the difference between AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets?
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Q12. A company wants to review their entire AWS architecture against best practices for security, performance, reliability, and cost before a major production launch. Which service provides a structured, guided review with improvement recommendations?
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