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Ask HN: Developers with small AWS clusters, what are your monthly costs?

20 points by lhuser123 9y ago

Aws costs are hard to understand for the non experienced. Perhaps a few real life examples could help.

wolfgang42 9y ago
Not sure if it's possible to edit this, but a better title might be "Ask HN: Developers with small AWS clusters, what are your monthly costs?" I read the title and thought it might be a proposal for some sort of scheme to partition individual EC2 instances between multiple projects by different people.
- lhuser123 9y ago
  Done :)
malux85 9y ago
AWS Cost Calculator has been pretty accurate for me: https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html
byoung2 9y ago
At my last company, about $30k per month when I took over as director of engineering in 2014, but I was able to reduce it to about $20k while increasing the number of instances using no upfront cost reserved instances. We ran a crawling infrastructure of about 150 instances and we increased to 200 while reducing the cost. We also had 3 of the largest instance types they had for our database, and 8 large instances serving the app, reporting, api, and alert services.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
OtterCoder 9y ago
I run a private git repo and anywhere between 0-6 additional instances and lambdas for development and testing. I haven't gone over $50 in a month.
- lhuser123 9y ago
  Would you share more details about it ?
adamwi 9y ago
We run a collaboration service [1] on AWS, nothing fancy in terms of infrastructure needs (DB, some EC2 instances and S3). We spend around 500 USD per month, but our largest customers run run our service on prem on their own servers. [1] www.qlutter.io
twobyfour 9y ago
How small is small?
- lhuser123 9y ago
  Any information would be appreciated
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
kingofspain 9y ago
For a client of mine: couple of large DB instances + some smaller, several EC2, several TB in S3, Elasticsearch and elasticache + some misc bits. Was coming in around $2000/mo before we snagged some free credits. A good 50%+ was RDS costs though.
busterarm 9y ago
We switched several projects to Lightsail and saved a ton of money immediately, so i don't have old figures, but it's roughly around $600/mo today. A couple of other projects we have on hosted services could be moved to AWS that would probably add about $400 on to our bill. Lightsail has saved us a ridiculous amount of money, honestly, at the cost of having to do slightly more complex sysops. The biggest thing that would eat up cost if we put it on AWS would be our ELK stack. We have on-metal infrastructure with tons of spare capacity that would probably run us about $2.5k/mo on AWS and just under double that on Elastic (but then we'd get X-Pack for free). Yeah. Logging and monitoring are totally the most expensive part of our infrastructure.
- lhuser123 9y ago
  > but it's roughly around $600/mo today Do you have an estimate of how many Lightsail servers and other components are running ?
  - busterarm 9y ago
    We keep upping our cap with AMZN and then hitting it. I think right now we're pushing 40? We're doing some things with autoscaling w/ Terraform and it changes. EBS, EC2 and CloudSearch are the biggest part of our AMZN bill. I can't estimate components there atm.
technion 9y ago
I'm running https://ctadvisor.lolware.net https://ctadvisor.lolware.net for about $22 per month. It's one EC2 instance, an S3 bucket, EC2 snapshots and cold archives in Glacier.
jonathanbull 9y ago
At https://emailoctopus.com https://emailoctopus.com we're running around the $2.5k/month mark. Previously $3.5k, but we saved a bunch of money with reserved instances: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/reserved-instances/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/reserved-instances/

20 points by lhuser123 9y ago

Aws costs are hard to understand for the non experienced. Perhaps a few real life examples could help.

Not sure if it's possible to edit this, but a better title might be "Ask HN: Developers with small AWS clusters, what are your monthly costs?" I read the title and thought it might be a proposal for some sort of scheme to partition individual EC2 instances between multiple projects by different people.

lhuser123 9y ago
Done :)

malux85 9y ago

AWS Cost Calculator has been pretty accurate for me: https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html

byoung2 9y ago

At my last company, about $30k per month when I took over as director of engineering in 2014, but I was able to reduce it to about $20k while increasing the number of instances using no upfront cost reserved instances. We ran a crawling infrastructure of about 150 instances and we increased to 200 while reducing the cost. We also had 3 of the largest instance types they had for our database, and 8 large instances serving the app, reporting, api, and alert services.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

OtterCoder 9y ago

I run a private git repo and anywhere between 0-6 additional instances and lambdas for development and testing. I haven't gone over $50 in a month.

lhuser123 9y ago
Would you share more details about it ?

adamwi 9y ago

We run a collaboration service [1] on AWS, nothing fancy in terms of infrastructure needs (DB, some EC2 instances and S3). We spend around 500 USD per month, but our largest customers run run our service on prem on their own servers. [1] www.qlutter.io

twobyfour 9y ago

How small is small?

lhuser123 9y ago
Any information would be appreciated

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

kingofspain 9y ago

For a client of mine: couple of large DB instances + some smaller, several EC2, several TB in S3, Elasticsearch and elasticache + some misc bits. Was coming in around $2000/mo before we snagged some free credits. A good 50%+ was RDS costs though.

busterarm 9y ago

We switched several projects to Lightsail and saved a ton of money immediately, so i don't have old figures, but it's roughly around $600/mo today. A couple of other projects we have on hosted services could be moved to AWS that would probably add about $400 on to our bill. Lightsail has saved us a ridiculous amount of money, honestly, at the cost of having to do slightly more complex sysops. The biggest thing that would eat up cost if we put it on AWS would be our ELK stack. We have on-metal infrastructure with tons of spare capacity that would probably run us about $2.5k/mo on AWS and just under double that on Elastic (but then we'd get X-Pack for free). Yeah. Logging and monitoring are totally the most expensive part of our infrastructure.

lhuser123 9y ago
> but it's roughly around $600/mo today Do you have an estimate of how many Lightsail servers and other components are running ?
- busterarm 9y ago
  We keep upping our cap with AMZN and then hitting it. I think right now we're pushing 40? We're doing some things with autoscaling w/ Terraform and it changes. EBS, EC2 and CloudSearch are the biggest part of our AMZN bill. I can't estimate components there atm.

technion 9y ago

I'm running https://ctadvisor.lolware.net https://ctadvisor.lolware.net for about $22 per month. It's one EC2 instance, an S3 bucket, EC2 snapshots and cold archives in Glacier.

jonathanbull 9y ago

At https://emailoctopus.com https://emailoctopus.com we're running around the $2.5k/month mark. Previously $3.5k, but we saved a bunch of money with reserved instances: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/reserved-instances/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/reserved-instances/