What is the pricing model that enables AWS customers to pay for the resources on an as needed basis?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an on-demand cloud computing solution provided by Amazon, which includes 200+ services, platforms, and application programming interfaces that are leveraged by enterprises, governments, and individual customers on a pay-as-you-go model. This article explains what AWS is in detail. It also lists its top services, along with pricing information.

What Is AWS?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a Comprehensive and Versatile Offering
Source: KCS

AWS is a collection of cloud computing goods and services. Amazon’s subsidiary offers servers, networking, storage, remote computing, mobile development, email, and security solutions. EC2, Amazon’s virtual computer service, Glacier, a low-cost cloud storage service, and S3, Amazon’s storage system, are the three core AWS offerings.

It has surpassed several of its market competitors in recent years in terms of presence and scale. According to Synergy Research Group’s study published in February 2022, AWS held nearly a third of the market (32.4%), followed by the Azure cloud by Microsoft (20%) and the Google Cloud Platform (9%).

AWS has also evolved to become a significant part of the e-commerce giant’s commercial portfolio, apart from Amazon’s other products and services. AWS earned a record $14.8 billion in total sales in the second quarter of 2021, accounting for slightly over 13% of its total sales as per its 2021 annual earnings call.

AWS’ growth and popularity can be attributed to the following factors:

A large number of functionalities: AWS offers various services and features, ranging from traditional infrastructure technologies like computation, storage, and databases to new technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning, data lakes and analytics, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Within such services, AWS also provides highly advanced features. For example, AWS has the broadest range of databases, all purpose-built for specific applications, allowing you to select the best tool for the job in terms of cost and efficiency.
Sizable customer and partner community: AWS offers the world’s most dynamic ecosystem with millions of active users and partners worldwide. Every possible use case is being executed on AWS by customers from practically every industry of every size, encompassing startups, businesses, and government organizations. Thousands of industry professionals specializing in AWS services, along with independent software companies (ISVs) who adapt their systems to work on AWS, are members of the AWS Partner Network (APN).
Robust security: AWS is designed to be one of the most secure cloud computing platforms today. Its core infrastructure is designed to meet the security needs of the military, international banks, and other enterprises dealing with sensitive information. With 230 safety, compliance, and control services and capabilities, this is backed by a comprehensive range of cloud security tools. AWS provides 90 security protocols and compliance approvals, and all 117 AWS services that use client data have encryption capabilities.
Rapid pace of innovation: You may use AWS to explore new ideas and innovate faster by leveraging the latest technology. For example, it pioneered serverless computing with the introduction of AWS Lambda in 2014. This enables developers and IT professionals to execute code without deploying or maintaining servers. AWS has also developed Amazon SageMaker, a highly scalable machine learning (ML) service that allows even novice developers and experts to use machine learning.
Proven operational expertise: AWS offers experience, competence, dependability, security, and speed to support mission-critical applications. For more than 15 years, AWS has provided cloud services to various customers worldwide, who use them for multiple applications. AWS is the cloud provider with the most practical experience at a larger scale.

The AWS servers are spread throughout 81 network segments. These serviced zones are segregated to allow consumers to impose geographical boundaries on their services (if they so wish) and ensure security by distributing data over multiple physical sites. AWS covers 245 nations and territories worldwide.

See More: How To Secure Enterprise Data Using the AWS Shared Responsibility Model

List of AWS Services

Now that we have seen some of Amazon AWS’s essential features let’s look at the services that make this possible. This AWS services directory will walk you through the top 15 options to get you started.

1. Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)

Amazon’s EC2 cloud technology provides secure and scalable compute capability. It aims to empower developers with access to web-based, scalable cloud technologies. Besides that, EC2 also gives users total control over their computer resource consumption. It helps deploy apps quickly without buying hardware upfront and deploy virtual servers as required and at scale.

2. Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

Simple Storage Service or Amazon S3 is a cloud-based service for object storage that delivers superior data availability, scalability, performance, and security. Industries and enterprises of all sizes may save and safeguard vast amounts of data in data storage, cloud-native apps, mobile applications, etc. You can save money, organize data, and establish fine-tuned access restrictions to suit specific business, institutional, and compliance issues with cost-effective storage categories and easy-to-use administration tools.

3. AWS Aurora

Amazon Aurora is the most popular AWS service right now. It is a database system compatible with PostgreSQL and MySQL, and it is much faster than conventional MySQL databases. Its other use case is the automation of essential processes like hardware supply, system implementation, backup scheduling, and software patching. Further, Amazon Aurora is a networked storage system fault-tolerant and self-healing. It can scale elastically in response to demand.

4. Amazon DynamoDB

DynamoDB is a thriving new AWS product on the list of AWS services. DynamoDB is an AWS service with a completely managed and serverless NoSQL database. It’s also a cost-effective, quick, and versatile database solution that gives developers creative freedom. It provides performance in the single-digit millisecond range and infinite throughput and space. DynamoDB includes capabilities for generating actionable insights, analyzing data, and tracking traffic patterns in applications.

5. Amazon RDS

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) enables database administration, scalability, and easy cloud-based setup. This can automate time-consuming activities, including database setup, hardware provisioning, recoveries, upgrading, and focusing on cost optimization. RDS provides six well-known database engines – namely, Amazon Aurora, MySQL, Oracle database, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and SQL server – on different database systems designed for performance and storage. You can quickly replicate or migrate existing data to Amazon RDS using the AWS Database Migration Service.

See More: Common AWS Services Explained: EC2, RDS, S3, VPC

6. Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is yet another unique Amazon Web Services offering. It is a content delivery network (CDN) for global content delivery that allows organizations to reach a large audience while maintaining security and efficiency. This AWS service transmits data at a rapid rate with minimal latency. With the help of automatic network mapping and clever routing methods, content is effectively delivered to recipients. Data security is improved by using traffic cryptography and user access. CloudFront has three capabilities to power lightning-fast data transfers — i.e., built-in data compression, field-level encryption, and edge computational power. Furthermore, you may use Amazon CloudFront to broadcast high-quality video from AWS media activities to any device rapidly and continuously.

7. Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)

Amazon EBS is a block storage solution that may be utilized inside Amazon EC2. It can provide higher throughput to support transactional applications and applications at any scale. It can handle a wide range of workloads, including relational and non-relational datasets and business applications. EBS allows customers to choose from five distinct volumes to obtain the best cost and effectiveness. Adjust the volume type and size to superb performance without disrupting other critical applications while keeping storage costs low on an as-needed basis.

8. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

Amazon VPC enables the building of a virtualized environment with the ability to scale AWS deployment. VPC offers total domain control, including customization of IP address range, subnets creation, route table configuration, and network points access management. With configurable dashboard administration controls built for optimum use, you can easily change your VPC’s network settings. Users can, for instance, create a public-facing subdomain for web servers that have internet connectivity.

9. Amazon Kinesis

Kinesis is a data streaming service by AWS. Real-time data collection, processing, and evaluation are possible with Amazon Kinesis, enabling you to respond quickly to events. Kinesis’ capacity to perform cost-effective data stream processing at scale and the option to choose the tools best suited to your application are two of its critical features. Video, audio, application logs, website activity, and IoT telemetry are all examples of its use cases. Kinesis may also help train learning algorithms by ingesting real-world data. Users may track, analyze, and synthesize data directly with Kinesis, allowing an immediate response.

10. Amazon Auto Scaling

As the name suggests, Auto Scaling is a dynamic resource provisioning service that enables automated scalability. The AWS Auto Scaling service tracks all your applications on the cloud and automatically changes capacity to ensure consistent results at the lowest possible cost. It allows users to rapidly configure application scalability capabilities for numerous resources in different services. Using Auto Scaling, you can construct scaling plans for various assets utilizing a feature-rich user interface and easy to use, helping you save time and money. AWS resources are accessible via this service, such as EC2 tasks, EC2 instances and Spot Fleets, Amazon Aurora replicas, and DynamoDB tables and indexes.

See More: AWS vs. Azure: Your Guide to Choosing the Best Cloud Provider in 2021

11. Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Users can seamlessly access resources and applications like Azure Active Directory using AWS IAM. It controls access to multiple resources based on roles and access policies, allowing you to accomplish fine-grained access management. The AWS IAM access analyzer simplifies permission management by allowing you to define, verify, and refine permissions. Furthermore, AWS IAM attribute-based access management will enable you to set fine-grained access permissions depending on user factors like department, job role, and team name.

12. Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)

AWS SQS is a network control service that allows decoupling and scaling microservices, serverless applications, and distributed databases.

SQS removes the complexities and costs associated with maintaining and managing message-oriented middleware, freeing up developers so that they may concentrate on specific tasks. Consumers can use SQS to transmit, store, and receive notifications in bulk between many software components without compromising message contents or necessitating the availability of other elements. Two types of messaging queues are available with SQS: usual queues, which offer the highest throughput, and FIFO queues, which ensure that messages are handled only once and in the precise order in which they happened.

13. Amazon SageMaker

Amazon SageMaker is an AWS service that enables large-scale ML model development, training, and deployment. It’s an analytical tool that uses Machine Learning to examine data better. You can create high-quality ML models rapidly with its single toolkit. Not only can Amazon SageMaker produce reports, but it also has the capability of making forecasts. Furthermore, Amazon Ground Truth Plus generates datasets without the need for labeling software.

14. Amazon ElastiCache

ElastiCache is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) service that simplifies setting up, operating, and scaling open-source in-memory document storage. By reviewing data from high-throughput and low-latency data stores, you may run data-intensive apps or improve the performance of current databases. Caching gaming, live analytics, geospatial services, session stores, and queuing are among the use cases for AWS ElastiCache. ElastiCache provides fully managed Redis and Memcached apps for high-maintenance applications that demand sub-millisecond response speeds.

15. Amazon Cloud Directory

Cloud Directory enables you to create long-lasting cloud-native directories with different dimensions for content hierarchy structure. Organizational charts, program catalogs, and device registrations are just a few use cases for users to create directories. Organizational charts can scale to millions of objects by navigating through individual levels for reporting structure, locality, and cost unit. Cloud Directory automates time-consuming and costly administrative chores such as infrastructure scalability and server management. Users can build a directory, set a strategy, and then populate their directory using the Cloud Directory API.

See More: Why AWS Certification Matters in a Cloud Driven World

AWS Pricing and Pricing Calculator

Prices for Amazon services vary depending on which service you choose. Various methods are used to calculate these rates, but the most popular is based on time spent utilizing the service. Like most public cloud solutions, you only pay for the time spent using the service. This pricing model has three prongs:

Pay-as-you-go: Pay-as-you-go enables you to readily adapt to new business requirements without jumping offside your finances, allowing you to be more sensitive to change. You may change your business based on demand rather than forecasts with a pay-as-you-go strategy, lowering the risk of overprovisioning or capacity gaps.
Save-when-you-commit: Savings plans give discounts over On-Demand for AWS Compute and AWS Machine Learning in return for a one- or three-year promise to utilize a given quantity (measured in $/hour) of an AWS service or a range of services.
Pay-less-by-using-more: As your usage grows, you may take advantage of AWS’s volume-based reductions and save money. Pricing for services like S3 is tiered, which means you pay less per GB the more you use. AWS enables you to purchase services that will assist you in meeting your business’s requirements.

Here is the pricing information for the top AWS services:

Amazon EC2: $0.09 per GB for the first 10 TB per month
Amazon S3: $0.023 per GB for the First 50 TB per month
AWS Aurora: $0.10 per GB per month for storage
Amazon DynamoDB: $0.02 per 100,000 data reading operations
Amazon RDS: $0.016 per hour for standard db.t4g.micro instances
Amazon CloudFront: $0.085 per TB for the first 10 TB
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS): $0.08 per GB-month for general purpose storage
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS): From $0.40 per million requests
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC): Free (optional features payable)
Amazon Kinesis: $0.04 per data stream per hour
Amazon AutoScaling: Free
Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM): Free
Amazon SageMaker: $0.05 per hour for a configuration comprising 4 GiB and ml.t3.medium instances
Amazon ElastiCache: From $0.781 per hour
Amazon Cloud Directory: $0.25 per GB for storage

The pricing will vary as per your selected data center region. For specific details, companies can refer to the AWS Pricing Calculator. This tool helps enterprises learn more about AWS services and estimate the cost of their most common use cases and custom applications. You can design your solutions before they’re built, look into the price ranges and calculations into your estimate, and locate instance types and contract terms that fit your requirements. This gives you the information you need to decide whether or not to use Amazon Web Services. You can budget for your AWS prices and use and estimate the cost of launching a new cluster and services.

The AWS Pricing Calculator is beneficial for new and existing AWS customers looking to reorganize or extend their AWS usage. No previous knowledge of the cloud or AWS is required to use the AWS Pricing Calculator. Here are the steps for using this tool to generate an estimate:

Visit the AWS pricing calculator page and click on the Create estimate button.
You will see a list of all the AWS services available in your region. You can learn more about each service at this step or configure them as per the use case.
The configuration page will ask for some necessary information to calculate billing, such as data center region, the average size of data requests, and integration usage. Enter this data as accurately as possible.
You can add more than one service to the estimate. Once this step is complete, you can generate the final estimate for AWS. Remember that it also offers a free tier to help you get started.

The AWS Pricing Calculator now also supports CloudFront. It provides a granular view of expenses across various user tiers and CloudFront locations and advice for estimating the number of requests depending on your data transfer rate.

See More: 5 Ways To Stop Your Cloud Costs From Ballooning Beyond Your Control

Takeaways

Customers, businesses, and communities can benefit from AWS services in various ways. AWS services help companies increase productivity and reduce time-to-value by maximizing the utilization of applications and infrastructure. AWS is among the most significant public cloud providers globally, and it pays special attention to emerging technologies like IoT, artificial intelligence (AI), and ML. Companies can utilize AWS offerings to develop new and industry-leading products on the cloud, with a degree of flexibility impossible to achieve with on-premise infrastructure.

Did this article help you learn about AWS, its list of services, and its pricing model? Tell us on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. We’d love to hear from you!

What is the pricing model that enables AWS customers to pay for resources on an as needed basis quizlet?

What is the pricing model that allows AWS customers to pay for resources on an 'as needed' basis? Pay as you go. Why is AWS more economical than traditional data centers for applications with varying compute workloads? Amazon EC2 instances can be launched on-demand when needed.

What are the 3 pricing models of AWS?

Understand the fundamentals of pricing There are three fundamental drivers of cost with AWS: compute, storage, and outbound data transfer. These characteristics vary somewhat, depending on the AWS product and pricing model you choose.

What is an advantage of using the on

The benefit of on-demand pricing is that you don't have to plan in advance how many instances you need. This gives you maximum flexibility. However, it comes at a cost. On-demand pricing is the highest of the lot.

What is the primary tool used to price AWS services and solutions AWS?

AWS Well-Architected Tool pricing.