abnormal AWS billing charges at every first day of the month - amazon-web-services

So I am using multiple resources in AWS. The charges make sense for most services. however, at every first day of the month, I am getting charged more than I should.
For example; charges for services such as, Aws active directory service, EC2, step function, the elastic search is normal throughout the day. as I can drill down daily charges for these services. but every first day of the month, AWS charging more than what it usually charges. For example; if the average charge for EC2 instances for the day is $5 then at every 1st date(let's say 1st January) of the month, the charges end up for EC2 instance somewhere around $15 and again on 2nd January charges would back normal to $5.
also, for the AWS Contact center telecommunication service, my usual charges for the day would be around $10. but again on the first day of the month, I am getting charged around $150. This is way more than what it charges on regular days.
I don't get this behavior. is it done on purpose or am I missing something?
Thanks.

This is Tax, which appears on the very first day of each month.

Related

AWS billing on demand EC2 price fluctuation

AWS is sending an invoice at the end of each month with the price of the EC2 instance and the number of used hours. Since the price fluctuates, which price is taken to compute the bill? The price at the end of the month, at the beginning of the month or the real price for each used hour?
Thanks
If you are using on-demand EC2 instances, the prices don't fluctuate. When AWS does reduce prices, the new pricing takes effect on a specific date and your bill should reflect the reduced prices as of that date.
There are some complexities in billing when you have credits or Reserved Instances, especially when you use multiple accounts with Organizations or Consolidated billing.
There are some products that have thresholds - for example, S3 standard storage gets cheaper the more you use - the first 50TB are $0.023/GB, the next 450 TB are $0.022/GB, etc.

AWS Free Tier Alert

So I'm receiving this alert at the end of every month for the past year.
And rightly so in my cost & Bills Dashboard there it is:
But each month I go in RDS Dashboard and it is empty, I checked every tab and didn't found anything.
Could that be a glitch ?
Thanks a lot
This is because AWS count this if how long your AWS instance is running other than other factors.
For RDS the maximum amount of time an instance can run is 750 hours which usually cover a complete month of 31 days.
Normally you use *30 = 720 (744 in the case of 31 days) hours so AWS wore you if your free tier is about to exceed.
if you calculate then it would be about the % showing by the console.

AWS EC2 spot instance billing

I have created an EC2 spot instance, using automated bidding and an EC2 instance was created within a few minutes and I terminated the same after a few minutes.
How do I know how much I would be billed for the spot instance I ran? I browsed the 'Instances' and the 'Spot Requests' tab for the same, but could not get the same.
You want to use the Spot Instance Data Feed:
To help you understand the charges for your Spot Instances, Amazon EC2 provides a data feed that describes your Spot Instance usage and pricing. This data feed is sent to an Amazon S3 bucket that you specify when you subscribe to the data feed.
Data feed files arrive in your bucket typically once an hour, and each hour of usage is typically covered in a single data file. These files are compressed (gzip) before they are delivered to your bucket. Amazon EC2 can write multiple files for a given hour of usage where files are very large (for example, when file contents for the hour exceed 50 MB before compression).
By the way, with the new per-second billing for EC2 instances, Linux spot instances will also be billed per-second.
You always pay the current spot price. If you bid 0.20$ and the current spot price is 0.15$ then you pay 0.15$ for that one hour. As soon as the next hours starts, you pay, whathever the new spot price is at that moment your second hours starts.
You always pay the full hour even though you shut down your instance before the end of that one hour. The only exception from that, is when your spot instance gets terminated because the spot price exceed your bid price. Then the last hour is not charged. Example: If the spot price exceeds your bid 15 minutes after the second hour has begun, than you only have to pay the first hour. If the spot price exceeds your bid 59 minutes after the second hour has begun, than you still only pay the first hour.
Also refer to this page:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-spot-instances.html

Do I get charged every time I create a new AWS WorkSpace?

They say there is always a monthly fee. But does it get charged as the month progresses or right away?
Amazon WorkSpaces is charged on a pro-rata basis.
So, if you run one for one week and turn it off, you'll be charged approximately one quarter of the monthly fee.
The first month's fee and the last month's fee are similarly pro-rated, based upon how long the WorkSpace was running.
There is no charge for creating a WorkSpace.

What counts as "usage" in Redshift?

Say I just issue a daily copy command, as opposed to streaming all my data immediately into redshift. Does that mean I have a really low percent usage, and therefore I have a low bill?
According to the Amazon simple monthly calculator, using 10 ds1.xlarge on-demand nodes will run me $6,844.20 a month.
However, if I only use those nodes for one hour a day, it will only run me $263.50 a month.
To be more specific, there are two strategies I'm considering. One is to send my data (which comes in at a rate of hundreds a second) to a Firehose stream, which is pointed at a Redshift cluster (with an intermediate S3 bucket of course). The other strategy is to send my data to a different Firehose stream, which is pointed at an S3 bucket; then, I issue a daily COPY command (through JDBC). Let's assume that I read very rarely from my database, such that the total amount of time spent COPYing and reading in my database does not exceed one hour per day.
You pay for Redshift by the server hour, just like EC2, RDS and ElastiCache. You are reserving a specific amount of server resources and you pay for that each hour that it exists, regardless of actual "usage".
The "Usage" field in the calculator defaults to "100% Utilized/Month" which would result in the price of a Redshift cluster that existed for the entire month. By changing it to "1 Hours/Day" you have indicated to the price calculator that you plan to create a Redshift cluster once a day, and delete it before it has existed for more than an hour, and then do that again the next day, every day of the month.
The amount of time you spend copying/updating/reading from your Redshift cluster has no bearing on the monthly price of the cluster.