Academy Cloud Foundations (ACF) 1.0.5 (EN): Module 05 Student Guide 5

Academy Cloud Foundations (ACF)

Module 05 Student Guide

Version 1.0.5

100-ACFNDS-10-EN-SG

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Contents

Module 05: Cloud Support Services 4

AWS Academy Academy Cloud Foundations (ACF)

Welcome to Module 5 –Cloud Billing and Support Services.

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

The billing and support services module was designed to provide an overview of AWS billing

and support services. We will review AWS Organizations, which is how you manage multiple

AWS accounts and consolidated billing. We will also look at look at some tools that enable

you to view and estimate costs.

Finally, we will close with a look at how to find AWS white papers and documentation on all

AWS services, features, and resources.

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

How you are charged for using AWS can be very complicated. To help, AWS provides a billing

tool to help users understand how much they are spending in AWS.

Technical support of any solution is critical. In this module you will gain the insight needed to

select the support solution that best meets your needs and budget.

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

Introducing Part 1: AWS Organizations. In this part, we’ll look at AWS Organizations and

consolidated billing, along with its features and benefits.

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

AWS Organizations is an account management service that enables you to consolidate

multiple AWS accounts into an organization that you create and centrally manage. AWS

Organizations include consolidated billing and account management capabilities that help

you to better meet the budgetary, security, and compliance needs of your business.

The main benefit of AWS Organizations are:

•Centrally managed access policies across multiple AWS accounts.

•Controled access to AWS services.

•Automated AWS account creation and management.

•Consolidated billing across multiple AWS accounts.

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

Let’s start with some terminology to understand the structure of AWS Organizations.

The diagram displayed shows a basic organization, or root, that consists of seven accounts

organized into four organizational units (or OUs). An OU is a container for accounts within a

root. An OU can also contain other OUs enabling you to create a hierarchy that looks like an

upside down tree with a root at the top and branches of OUs that reach down ending in

accounts that are the leaves of the tree.

When you attach a policy to one of the nodes in the hierarchy, it flows down and affects all of

the branches and leaves. This organization has several policies that are attached to some of

the OUs or directly to accounts.

An OU can have only one parent and, currently, each account can be a member of exactly

one OU. An account is a standard AWS account that contains your AWS resources. You can

attach a policy to an account to apply controls to only that one account.

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

AWS Organizations enables you to:

•Create Service Control Policies (SCPs) that centrally control AWS services across multiple

AWS accounts.

•You can create groups of accounts and then attach policies to a group to ensure that the

correct policies are applied across the accounts.

•You can simplify account management by using Application Program Interface (APIs) to

automate the creation and management of new AWS accounts.

•Simplify the billing process by setting up a single payment method for all the AWS

accounts in your organization. With consolidated billing, you can see a combined view of

charges incurred by all your accounts as well as take advantage of pricing benefits from

aggregated usage. Consolidated billing provides a central location to manage billing across

all of your AWS accounts, and the ability to benefit from volume discounts.

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

AWS Organizations does not replace associating AWS Identity and Access Management

(IAM). policies with users, groups, and roles within an AWS account.

IAM policies let you allow or deny access to AWS services, such as Amazon S3, as well as

individual AWS resources, such as a specific S3 bucket, or individual API actions, such as

s3:CreateBucket. An IAM policy can be applied only to IAM users, groups, or roles, and it can

never restrict the root identity of the AWS account.

In contrast, with Organizations you use Service Control Policies (SCPs) to allow or deny

access to particular AWS services for individual AWS accounts or for groups of accounts

within an Organizational Unit (OU). The specified actions from an attached SCP affect all IAM

users, groups, and roles for an account, including the root account identity.

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

Keep in mind that this process assumes you have access to two existing AWS accounts, and

that you can sign in to each as an administrator.

To set up AWS Organizations, let’s review each step:

•Step 1 is to create your organization with your current AWS account as the master

account. You also invite one AWS account to join your organization and create another

account as a member account.

•Step 2 is to create two Organizational Units in your new organization and place the

member accounts in those OUs.

•Step 3 is to create Service Control Policies, which allow you to apply restrictions to what

actions can be delegated to users and roles in the member accounts by using these service

control policies. A service control policy is a type of organization control policy.

•Step 4 is to test your organization’s policies. Sign in as a user for each of the roles (such as

OU1, OU2, etc.) and see how the service control policies impact account access.

Alternatively, you can use the IAM policy simulator to test and troubleshoot IAM and

resource-based policies attached to IAM users, groups, or roles in your AWS account.

For more information on the IAM policy simulator, select the link.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/access_policies_testing-policies.html.

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

There are restrictions on names that you can create in AWS Organizations, which includes

names of accounts, OUs, roots, and policies.

Names must be composed of Unicode characters and not exceed 250 characters in length.

There are a number of maximum and minimum values for entities in the AWS Organizations.

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

AWS Organizations can be managed through multiple different interfaces:

The Management Console is a browser-based interface that you can use to manage your

organization and your AWS resources. You can perform any task in your organization by using

the console.

AWS Command Line Tools allow you to issue commands at your system's command line to

perform AWS Organizations and AWS tasks. This can be faster and more convenient than

using the console.

You can use also AWS Software Development Kits (SDKs) to take care of tasks such as

cryptographically signing requests, managing errors, and retrying requests

automatically. AWS SDKs consist of libraries and sample code for various programming

languages and platforms, such as Java, Python, Ruby, .NET, iOS, and Android.

The AWS Organizations HTTPS Query API gives you programmatic access to AWS

Organizations and AWS. It lets you issue HTTPS requests directly to the service. Note that

when you use the HTTPS API, you must include code to digitally sign requests using your

credentials.

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

AWS Organizations are available to all AWS customers at no additional charge!

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

In summary, organizations help you programmatically create AWS accounts and consolidate

them into a centrally managed organization.

AWS Organizations provides consolidated billing and account management capabilities that

help you reach your business goals around:

•Budget

•Security

•And compliance

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

Introducing Part 2: AWS Billing and Cost Management.

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

AWS Billing and Cost Management is the service you use to pay your AWS bill, monitor your

usage, and budget your costs. Billing and cost management enables you to forecast and

obtain a better idea of what your costs and usage may look like in the future so that you can

plan ahead.

You can set a custom time period and determine whether you would like to view your data at

a monthly or daily level of granularity.

With the filtering and grouping functionality, you can further analyze your data using a

variety of available dimensions. The AWS Cost and Usage Report Tool gives you the ability to

understand your cost and usage data trends and how you are using your AWS

implementation to identify opportunities for optimization.

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

The AWS Billing Dashboard lets you view the status of your month to date AWS expenditure,

pinpoint the services that account for the majority of your overall expenditure, and

understand at a high level how costs are trending.

One of the graphs located on the dashboard is the Spend Summary, which shows you how

much you spent last month, the estimated costs of your AWS usage for the month to date,

and a forecast for how much you are likely to spend this month.

Another graph is the Month-to-Date Spend by Service graph that shows the top services that

you use most and the proportion of costs attributed to that service.

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

From the billing dashboard, you can access a number of other cost management tools you

can use to estimate and plan your AWS costs including AWS Bills, AWS Cost Explorer, AWS

Budgets and AWS Cost and Usage Reports.

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

The AWS Bills page lists the costs that you incurred over the past month for each AWS

service with a further breakdown by AWS region and linked account.

This tool gives you access to the most up to date information on your costs and usage

including your monthly bill and the detailed breakdown of the AWS services you are using.

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

The AWS Billing and Cost Management console includes the Cost Explorer page for viewing

your AWS cost data as a graph.

With Cost Explorer you can visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage

over time.

The Cost Explorer includes a default report that helps you visualize the costs and usage with

your top cost incurring AWS services. The monthly running costs report gives you an

overview of all of your costs for the past three months and provides forecasted numbers for

the coming month with a corresponding confidence interval.

The Cost Explorer is a free tool that allows you to:

•View charts of your costs.

•View cost data for the past 13 months.

•Forecast how much you are likely to spend over the next three months.

•Discover patterns in how much you spend on AWS resources over time and identify cost

problem areas.

•Identify services that you use the most and/or metrics like which Availability Zones have

the most traffic or which linked AWS account is used the most.

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

AWS Budgets uses the cost visualization provided by Cost Explorer to show you the status of

your budgets and to provide forecasts of your estimated costs.

You can also use budgets to create notifications if you go over your budget for the month or

when your estimated costs exceed your budget. Budgets can be tracked at the monthly,

quarterly, or yearly level and you can customize the start and end dates. Budget alerts can be

sent via email and/or via Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS).

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

The AWS Cost and Usage Report is a single location for accessing comprehensive information

about your AWS costs and usage. This tool lists usage for each service category used by an

account and its users in hourly or daily line items as well as any tax that you have activated

for tax allocation purposes.

You can choose to have AWS to publish billing reports to a Amazon S3 bucket. These reports

can be updated once a day.

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

AWS Billing and Cost Management provides you with tools to help you access, understand,

allocate, control and optimize your AWS costs and usage. These tools include AWS Bills, AWS

Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets and AWS Cost and Usage Reports.

These tools give you access to the most comprehensive information about your AWS costs

and usage including which AWS services are the main cost drivers. Knowing and

understanding your usage and costs will enable you to plan ahead and improve your AWS

implementation.

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

Introducing Part 3: AWS Support Services.

Support is an essential element for any system. Outages can result in a loss of productivity,

high overhead rates, and even lost customers. Sometimes, it is helpful to have support that

can provide deeper insight into a product you are trying to use. To prevent these losses and

frustrations and have access to technical resources, you need to understand your support

options. Let’s review AWS Support and AWS Support Plans available to you.

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

Whether you are new or continuing to adopt AWS services and applications as your business

solutions, we want help you do amazing things with AWS. AWS Support is there to provide

you a unique combination of tools and expertise based on your current or future planned use

cases.

AWS Support has been developed to provide complete support and the right resources to aid

your success. We want to support all of our customers, including those who may just be

experimenting with AWS, those who are looking for production uses of AWS, and also our

customers who use AWS as a business-critical resource. AWS Support can vary the type of

support provided depending on the customer’s needs and goals in sight.

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

With AWS, customers can plan, deploy, and optimize with confidence.

If a user would like proactive guidance, AWS Support has Technical Account Managers

(TAMs) that are designated as that users primary point of contact. The Technical Account

Manager, or TAM, can provide guidance, architectural review, and continuous ongoing

communication to keep the user informed and prepared as they plan, deploy, and optimize

their solutions.

If a user wants to ensure they follow best practices to increase performance and fault

tolerance in the AWS environment, AWS Support has AWS Trusted Advisor. AWS Trusted

Advisor is like a customized cloud expert, but is an online resource that checks for

opportunities to reduce monthly expenditures and increase productivity.

For account assistance, the Support Concierge is a billing and account expert who will

provide quick and efficient analysis on the issue. The concierge addresses all non-technical

billing and account level inquiries.

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

At AWS we want you to be able to plan, deploy and optimize with confidence and, to support you, we

have developed specific plans to assist including Basic, Developer, Business, and Enterprise support plans.

•The Basic Support Plan offers:

•24/7 access to customer service, documentation, white papers and support forums.

•Access to six core Trusted Advisor checks.

•Access to Personal Health Dashboard.

•The Developer Support Plan offers resources for customers testing or doing early development on

AWS, as well as any customers who:

•Want access to guidance and technical support.

•Are exploring how to quickly put AWS to work.

•Use AWS for non-production workloads or applications.

•The Business Support Plan offers resources for customers running production workloads on AWS as

well as any customers who:

•Run one or more applications in production environments.

•Have multiple services activated, or use key services extensively.

•Depend on their business solutions to be available, scalable, and secure.

•The Enterprise Support Plan offers resources for customers running business and mission-critical

workloads on AWS, as well as any customers who want to:

•Focus on proactive management to increase efficiency and availability.

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

•Build and operate workloads following AWS best practices.

•Leverage AWS expertise to support launches and migrations.

•Use a Technical Account Manager (TAM) that provides technical expertise for the full

range of AWS services and obtains a detailed understanding of your use case and

technology architecture. The Technical Account Manager is the primary point of contact

for ongoing support needs.

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

Displayed are the support plans offering different services and price points.

Select the links to learn more.

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/pricing/.

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/compare-plans/.

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

It addition to understanding the costs associated with different support plans, it is critical to

understand the service levels associated with each plan. In addition to the support plan you

have selected, the case severity will drive the type of response that you receive. There are five

different severity levels:

•Critical: Your business is at risk. Critical functions of your application are unavailable.

•Urgent: Your business is significantly impacted. Important functions of your application are

unavailable.

•High: Important functions of your application are impaired or degraded.

•Normal: Non-critical functions of your application are behaving abnormally, or you have a

time-sensitive development question.

•Low: You have a general development question, or you want to request a feature.

Note that there is no case support with the Basic Support Plan. These response times should be

considered when determining which support plan is best for your organization.

Select the link to review a full support plan comparison.

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/compare-plans/.

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

An AWS Trusted Advisor is available to help users follow best practices that increase

performance and fault tolerance of their AWS environment. Trusted Advisor is an online

resource to help you reduce costs, increase performance, and improve security by optimizing

your AWS environment.

There are two types of trusted advisor options:

•Core checks and Recommendations come with all accounts.

•Full Trusted Advisor for Business and Enterprise support offerings.

Access AWS Trusted Advisor from the Management Tools section of the console.

The Trusted Advisor provides real-time guidance to help you provision your resources

following AWS best practices and to advise you on cost optimization, performance, security,

and fault tolerance.

An AWS Trusted Advisor is not focused on just one service and it is not just a security tool. An

AWS Trusted Advisor will tell you how the infrastructure is performing, when security groups

have been left open to the world, whether or not you are using fault tolerance, if you are at

risk with all everything deployed in an Availability Zone, or if you have resources deployed

that you are not using, but are still being charged for.

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

AWS White Papers are a collection of technical documents that outline many AWS relevant

topics like architecting best practices and security best practices, Cloud Computing Economics

and Serverless Architecture. You can access them by selecting the link.

These technical documents cover a tremendous range of ideas, thoughts, and concepts that

apply to cloud computing and AWS services.

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

AWS Support offers several different plan options that were created to fit your unique

needs. These plans include the Basic Support Plan, the Developer Support Plan, Business

Support Plan and the Enterprise Support Plan.

All support plans provide 24/7 access to customer service, AWS documentation, whitepapers,

and support forums, access to six core Trusted Advisor Checks, and access to the personal

Health Dashboard.

When additional technical support and support resources beyond this are required, you have

the option to select from the Developer, Business, and Enterprise options to fit your unique

business needs.

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

In summary, we discussed Organizations to understand different setup options and

their impact on costs.

We reviewed different AWS Billing and Cost Management tools to understand how to

gain visibility into AWS costs, and identified alternative AWS Support Plan options and

features.

Please take a moment to complete the Knowledge Assessment.

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

Thanks for participating!

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AWS Academy Module 05: Cloud Support Services

Academy Cloud Foundations (ACF) 1.0.5 (EN): Module 05 Student Guide 5

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