Cost / Billing

6 AWS Cost / Billing terms and services covered in certification exams, with exam-focused explanations.

Savings Plans

A pricing model where committing to a specific usage level (spend per hour) for 1 or 3 years earns discounts over On-Demand pricing. More flexible than Reserved Instances, with some types applicable across instance types and regions. Frequently tested in long-term compute cost optimization.

リザーブドインスタンス

A purchasing option for EC2 and RDS that reserves capacity for 1 or 3 years at significant discounts vs. On-Demand. Best for stable, predictable, always-running workloads. Compared with flexible Savings Plans and cheap-but-interruptible Spot in cost optimization questions.

スポットインスタンス

An EC2 purchasing option using AWS spare capacity at up to ~90% off On-Demand. AWS may reclaim capacity with short notice, so only interruption-tolerant batch jobs or stateless workloads are appropriate. Tested as the cost-reduction strategy for fault-tolerant workloads.

AWS Cost Explorer

A tool that visualizes and analyzes historical costs and usage in graphs, and forecasts future spend. Break down costs by service or tag to identify spending drivers. Appears as the analysis and investigation tool in cost management questions (vs. Budgets for alerts).

AWS Budgets

A budget management service that sets cost or usage thresholds and sends alerts via email or SNS when actual or forecasted spend nears or exceeds the threshold. Proactive cost control — distinguished from Cost Explorer (historical analysis) by its alerting capability.

S3 Intelligent-Tiering

A storage class that automatically monitors object access patterns and moves objects to the appropriate cost tier with no retrieval fee. Even low-frequency-tier objects maintain millisecond access. The answer for data with unknown or irregular access patterns.

Last updated: 2026-06-24

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