SAP-C02 Amazon AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional – New Domain 4 – Cost Control part 2

5. The Architecture of Consolidated Billing

Hey everyone and welcome back to the Knowledge Pool video series. And in today’s lecture we’ll be speaking more about consolidated billing. Now, consolidated billing is a very nice feature which AWS provides and this is something which typically organizations who have multiple AWS accounts should be using. So let’s go ahead and understand more about it. So as we have discussed, lots of organization nowadays they follow the approach of having multiple AWS accounts. So by this I mean that many of the organization they have separate AWS account for development environment, separate AWS account for staging and even separate AWS account for production. Now this is one of the best practices and it helps in making sure that the things remain separate.

Now, it brings quite good amount of benefits not only into security as well as into the costing factor. Now, I am doing consultancy for many startups and typically one of the recent startups, they are having issues related to costing and they have around three to four accounts individually and they have never done consolidated billing and they are actually facing lot of costing related factor. So consolidated billing is something that we are on the process of achieving for that startup and it will help them a lot as far as the costing factor is concerned. So let’s go ahead and understand on what are the benefits the consolidated billing would bring to a typical organization. So taking example of a startup, so a startup, this is one of the use case scenario where a startup has three AWS accounts and they basically pay for each and each and individual AWS account separately.

So at the end of the month they get three separate bills and they pay for each and every account individually. So they get bill of account A, they pay it individually, bill of account B paid individually, bill of account C paid individually. And this is one of the scenarios which you will find a lot of organizations who are having multiple AWS account. So this is the typical scenario, let’s look into what consolidated billing would really look like. So what happens in consolidated billing is that we need to link all of our AWS accounts with the central paying account through the help of AWS organizations. So you have three AWS accounts, you link all of these AWS accounts with a central paying account with the help of AWS organization.

Now, what typically happens is this central paying account is also an AWS account and when you link all of these accounts to the central account, this is called as the consolidated billing, then the bill of all these accounts can be visible in the central account and this actually brings a lot of benefits. So before we go into the benefits, let me show you on how exactly this can be done. So if you go to the AWS organizations, you see there is a button called create organization. Earlier actually consolidated billing was part of the billing section. Let me just open up the billing dashboard. So if you see there is an option of consolidated billing and now it says consolidated billing has now been replaced by AWS organization. So we need to go to AWS organization if we want to work with consolidated billing.

So when you go ahead and click on Create Organization, there are two major features. One is for enabling all the features or second is for enabling only consolidated billing. So if I just enable only the consolidated billing and create the organization now here it will actually show you only the current account, but you can actually add multiple accounts within the AWS organization. So as said, Paying account is also AWS account and within the Paying account you go to AWS Organization and you add another account that will be linked. So if I have account A, I’ll click on Invite account and I’ll put the account ID of this account that I have. So we will be looking into this in the upcoming lectures, but I hope you understood on how we can add new accounts to a central paying account.

So speaking about the benefits that consolidated billing gives us, first is it gives us one bill per linked AWS account. We’ll be looking into this when we do. The practical. Second is that it becomes quite easy to allocate costing and budgets because we can actually get a single bill of account A, single bill of account B, single bill of account C. So if this is development, if this is production, and if this is a staging from the paying account, we can easily see that development account is costing us $1,000. Production account is costing us, say, $5,000. So it becomes quite easy to allocate costing and budget. So if development account is costing us $1,000, we can maybe say okay, it’s time to reduce the costing expenditure of development account.

So that way it becomes much more easier. Third is it brings a lot of benefits related to the volume pricing. Now if you go into the AWS, there are a lot of benefits when you increase the usage. So this is one of the pricing of AWS S three. So you see the first 50 TB per month has a cost of zero point 23 per GB. Now after 50 TB, if you use more till next 450 TB, the amount is reduced to zero point 22. And furthermore, if you go more higher or if you use more higher, then the usage charge has become much more lower. So the more you use, the less you need to pay and this helps a lot, specifically when you do a consolidated billing. So what happens when you do a consolidated billing is the S three charge is combined together.

So you see 1st 50 terabyte is zero point 23 per month. So let’s assume that the production account is using 45 terabyte and the development account is using six terabyte. Now in the paying account you will be charged for total 50 1 storage. Now 51 terabytes. So for the first 50 terabyte we will be paying $0. 023 per GB and for the next 1 TB we will be paying 0. 022. So the volume pricing actually are combined together for all the linked accounts. So this is one important thing to remember and last but very important point to remember is that benefits of consolidated billing is applicable even for the reserved instances as well. So let’s look into how exactly that would work. So I have one account and I have two linked accounts.

So this is the consolidated billing that we have achieved. Now in Dev account I have running six on demand instances and in Prod account I have six reserved instances that I have brought and I’m running only three instances. So let’s assume that all of these are of same instance type and same instance family. So now what will happen is in Prod account you will see that only three instances are running. However, I have the capacity of six reserve instance. So six reserves instance are getting unutilized in the production account. So now if you are using the consolidated billing, what would happen is the unused three reserve instance pricing will apply for the Dev account as well.

So as far as the total cost is concerned, you will only be paying for the three on demand instances pricing. Since I have six reserved instances and I am only using three in consolidated billing, the remaining three reserved instance pricing will be applicable for the Dev account as well. So if you subtract three minus three and then you will only be charged for the three on demand instances. So these are some of the benefits when you are using the consolidated billing. So I hope you understood the overview about what consolidated billing is all about. And there are certain important pointers and best practices as far as the exams are concerned that you need to remember is that whatever the paying account is so this paying account, it is recommended that it should only be used for billing purpose only.

Do not deploy or do not create any resources in the paying account. Second is by default we can have a maximum of 20 linked accounts. So these accounts which are linked to the central account, this have the limit of maximum 20 by default which can be increased. And third, which is a very important point as far as exam is concerned is that even when linked, the paying account is individual and it does not have access on the resource of other accounts. This is very important. So whenever you are working with consolidated billing, even if the account A and account B are linked to the paying account, this means that paying account does not have access to resource of any of the account. So you have to remember, even if they are linked, paying account will not have any access to the resource of each of these linked accounts.

6. Understanding EC2 Instance Types

Hey everyone and welcome back to the Knowledge Portal video series. And today we’ll be speaking about yet another important topic called as easy to instance type. Now, whenever you launch a server, let’s assume you are launching some servers in production, you need to know the basic requirements of that specific application which is going to run, whether the application needs a faster Ram or it needs a faster CPU or maybe it needs a very fast storage device. So depending upon the requirements of that application, the hardware that you will be choosing will also differ. And this is the reason why understanding the available EC to instance types is very important. So when you talk about instance type, it basically describes the hardware component on which the EC to servers will be running.

Now this is very important. Now when you speak about hardware component, it can be CPU Ram, it can be graphic card, it can be storage. So for example there can be certain applications related to three day rendering. So those applications needs a very very fast graphic card and thus in those scenarios you will launch an instance which has a good graphic card that can sustain the applications requirement. So when you go to the EC to management console and when you click on launch instance so within this when you click on certain operating system you will see there is an instance type field which is available and along with that there is an instance family. So it starts with T two nano. So this is the smallest instance which is available right now in AWS.

 And as you go down there are various instance types. So you have T two series, you have M series, you have P series, you have R series, you have I series. So all of these series depicts a specific instance family. So when you look into T two series so the instance family is general purpose. Now if you go down into the C series, so C series you see it is compute optimized. So the CPU which is available in these kind of instance the CPU are actually much much more faster and it is basically used for application which needs a faster CPU. Now if you go a bit down you have P series and these P series are basically GPU compute. So these instances have a very fast graphic processor which is available. So for applications which needs 3D rendering or all of those applications who needs a faster GPU, then the P series will be really suitable then going down you have R series.

So R series are basically memory optimized so they have a very fast memory. So any application which needs a faster memory then you should be looking at the memory optimized base instances. So as a solutions architect you should be knowing for what applications, what are the instance type that should be used and this is what our purpose for our lecture is all about so when you look into the overview, there are various instance type which are available. You have a T Two series, you have an M series, you have C series, D series, I series, G series and each of these series are specific for a particular use case. So I have written down the use case as well, so that it will become much more easier for us to understand. So whenever you talk about T two series, so T two nano, T two micro.

So these are general purpose and they are meant for development environment.One thing, remember, never use T two series for production environment because these series are based on burstable performance. We’ll be discussing this in the relevant section. But remember, never use this in production. You should only use the T two series in development or testing environment. So the family is general purpose. Now, in the second column you have M three and M Four series. Now, this is also a general purpose. However, this can be used in production environment. So both are general purpose. The first can be used for dev testing, the second can be used for production. Then you have the C three, C four based instance. Now, these instances are basically for compute optimized.

So any application which needs a very fast computing power or very fast CPU, then these series will help. Now, the next two series are basically storage optimized. So whenever you need a very fast I ops or in the area of data warehousing or hadoop, then you need a storage optimized instances. So D three and I two are storage optimized, g two is graphic optimized, even P series are graphic optimized. R three, R four are memory optimized and X one is also memory optimized. Now, let me just show you one thing related to X one. Now let me see. So if you look into the Ram which is available in the X one, you see this is the memory series. And if you go down, look into the X 132 x large, it has 1952 GB of Ram. And this is something extraordinary. So this is currently the highest Ram instance which is available right now in AWS, almost two terabytes of Ram.

This is something really cool and this is the reason why X one comes into memory optimizer. It has very high memory. So you need to know about the overview about the instance type and the use cases. Because in exam they will give a specific use case. Like the application needs a graphical rendering capabilities, what is the instance type that you will be choosing and the first thing that should come into a minus G two base instances. So similar to this, there can be various scenarios which will be presented to you in your exam and you should be able to answer them very effectively. Now, one of the very easy ways to remember is the first letter. So C stands for Compute, D stands for density, g stands for graphics, I stands for I Ops. M stands for general purpose, main choice.

So there are two things that I wanted to show you. You have T two and you have M series. So both are general purpose. However, M, you can consider it as a main choice for general purpose, and this is how you should remember. So, since both M series and T series are for general purpose, just remember M is for main choice. So whenever you talk about production environment, your main choice for general purpose should be M based instances. And definitely any instance which starts with R are basically memory optimized along with X series. So this is one of the simple ways in which you can remember on what are the instance type and the use cases associated. So I hope you understood the basic overview related to the instance type.