AWS costs explained: Glossary

Key Points

The AWS Free Tier

  • The AWS Free Tier is available to any business or personal AWS account.

  • It has three schemes, 12 months free, Free Trials, and Always Free that apply to different types of service.

  • Your instance may use 12 months free services, EC2 compute and EBS storage services, and Always Free services, KMS login key management and Data Transfer services. EC2 and EBS free service quotas only apply to instances using t2.micro instance type and up to 30 GB storage.

  • You can easily check your service usage as compared to the Free-Tier limits in the Billing Dashboard option Free Tier and your bills in the option Bills. Check the first one every few days.
The AWS Cloud Credit for Research

  • AWS Cloud Credit for Research is open to graduate, posgraduate and PhD students at an accredited institution.

  • To apply you need to submit a project which requires some planning.

  • You need to open your AWS account to which the award promotional credit is applied.

Glossary

accession
a unique identifier assigned to each sequence or set of sequences
categorical variable
Variables can be classified as categorical (aka, qualitative) or quantitative (aka, numerical). Categorical variables take on a fixed number of values that are names or labels.
cleaned data
data that has been manipulated post-collection to remove errors or inaccuracies, introduce desired formatting changes, or otherwise prepare the data for analysis
conditional formatting
formatting that is applied to a specific cell or range of cells depending on a set of criteria
CSV (comma separated values) format
a plain text file format in which values are separated by commas
factor
a variable that takes on a limited number of possible values (i.e. categorical data)
Gb
gigabyte of file storage or file size
Gbase
a gigabase represents one billion nucleic acid bases (Gbp may indicate one billion base pairs of nucleic acid)
headers
names at tops of columns that are descriptive about the column contents (sometimes optional)
metadata
data which describes other data
NGS
common acronym for “Next Generation Sequencing” currently being replaced by “High Throughput Sequencing”
null value
a value used to record observations missing from a dataset
observation
a single measurement or record of the object being recorded (e.g. the weight of a particular mouse)
plain text
unformatted text
quality assurance
any process which checks data for validity during entry
quality control
any process which removes problematic data from a dataset
raw data
data that has not been manipulated and represents actual recorded values
rich text
formatted text (e.g. text that appears bolded, colored or italicized)
string
a collection of characters (e.g. “thisisastring”)
TSV (tab separated values) format
a plain text file format in which values are separated by tabs
variable
a category of data being collected on the object being recorded (e.g. a mouse’s weight)