This section of the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional learning path introduces you to cost management concepts and services relevant to the SAP-C02 exam. By the end of this section, you will know how to select and apply AWS services to optimize cost in scenarios relevant to the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional exam.
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Learning Objectives
- Learn how to improve planning and cost control with AWS Budgets
- Understand how to optimize storage costs
- Discover AWS services that allow you to monitor for underutilized resources
- Learn how the AWS Instance Scheduler may be used to optimize resource costs
AWS credits are applied to bills to help cover costs that are associated with eligible services. They are applied until they are exhausted or they expire. With credits AWS introduced a sort of reward system for particularly active users and developers. You can use them instead of spending money on certain services.
So you may ask yourself, "How do I get credits?" So, there are multiple ways. For example, developing and publishing a skill for Alexa or by attending webinars and events. As a startup, you can use the AWS Activate program or through the AWS Credit Program for Nonprofits.
In my case, let's jump here to the credits section, I did a few AWS certifications, and for that I was rewarded by AWS with two $300 credit vouchers which is pretty cool. I used them here for my private account to play around with a few services that I was interested in and as you can see here, you can see a list of which these credits can be applied to. And there are almost all services that are available for AWS. And what's quite funny is, the AWS cost explorer that can also cost money when you are using the API is not listed here. So, for the billing services and the cost services you can't use these credits.
Danny has over 20 years of IT experience as a software developer, cloud engineer, and technical trainer. After attending a conference on cloud computing in 2009, he knew he wanted to build his career around what was still a very new, emerging technology at the time — and share this transformational knowledge with others. He has spoken to IT professional audiences at local, regional, and national user groups and conferences. He has delivered in-person classroom and virtual training, interactive webinars, and authored video training courses covering many different technologies, including Amazon Web Services. He currently has six active AWS certifications, including certifications at the Professional and Specialty level.