7 ms·

AWS Costs Cheat Sheet

174 points by edbyrne 14y ago

JackJ 14y ago
Helpful - thanks
ck2 14y ago
my mini-comparison Cloud Static Storage (cents/gigabyte) site storage bandwidth dreamobjects 7 7 http://dreamhost.com/cloud/dreamobjects/pricing/ cloudfiles 10 18 http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/public/files/pricing/ amazon s3 12.5 12 http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
- spindritf 14y ago
  What about performance?
  - dredmorbius 14y ago
    And reliability. S3 is specced as being very reliable.
- jwr 14y ago
  You get what you pay for. I used to be a dreamhost customer a couple of years ago, tried to actually use the storage tied to my hosting account. Dreamhost threatened to terminate those accounts that used significant amounts of storage (the storage people supposedly "bought" with their hosting account). I learned my lesson — there is cheap hosting and real hosting. Just as there are "unlimited" data plans (that get capped) and the real ones that you actually pay for. These days I always look for solutions that have a real business model behind them, not overbooked marketing gimmicks. Which means that amazon and rackspace are in, dreamhost is out.
Florin_Andrei 14y ago
The AWS cost structure is byzantine in its complexity. This cheat sheet helps a lot. Thank you.
- okrasz 14y ago
  Try using http://www.cloudorado.com/ http://www.cloudorado.com/ . You just specify your requirements (RAM, CPU, subscription duration) and it finds appropriate options for you, including reserved, packages, etc. And it will give you price not only of AWS but other clouds a well.
ojbyrne 14y ago
Useful. QA Comment: There's a typo in Instance Sizes, "mirco."
scottyallen 14y ago
This is very useful. Spot instance costs would be really doubly useful, particularly if you can put them alongside on-demand costs.
- flyt 14y ago
  Spot instance prices change hourly, so they probably don't make sense to add to a static list like this.
  - scottyallen 14y ago
    Yep, I understand that. Still, spot pricing it relatively consistent over time, with occasional temporary spikes. A dynamic web version with this format would work too. It's less important to me that I can print it out, since I probably would just end up referring to this online as I need it.
calpaterson 14y ago
Aren't the on-demand prices a bit useless? Doesn't everyone reserve instances?
- mfringel 14y ago
  Everyone reserves instances, but they do other things, too. You can do a setup based on application demand, such that you have reserved instances for baseline load, and then a mix of spot instances and on-demand instances for load/spikes over baseline.
- dagw 14y ago
  Depends very much what you're using it for. I do a lot of ad-hoc data processing and use on-demand all the time.
  - calpaterson 14y ago
    If you do more than occasional processing, it's probably worth buying at least light utilisation reservation. Most people who use EC2 professionally (and who don't use spot instances) would or should be paying a reserve price
- bmelton 14y ago
  As dagw said, it pretty much depends on what you're doing. We have dev, test and stage instances that are almost always off. I'm not going to reserve those at all, because I won't generate enough charge on them over the course of a year to even meet the initial payment. For our production instances, yes, obviously we're reserving, but there are lots of cases where you wouldn't. Even with production instances, we occasionally spool up another instance to handle load spikes, for which we don't boot a reserved instance. In another of our apps, we actually spool up a new AWS instance to handle customer requests. The user clicks a button on a website, uploads a (large) file, which we spool up an instance to process for awhile, return the results then shut the instance down. That kind of usage isn't really suitable for reservation.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
jelder 14y ago
Complementary chart: http://www.ec2instances.info/ http://www.ec2instances.info/
- bmelton 14y ago
  Having built a SaaS app that basically means spinning up a new instance for each customer, I reference ec2instances.info almost daily. I only came into this discussion to post it -- glad to see somebody else already did.
akh 14y ago
Very cool! This is useful for small deployments. We developed PlanForCloud.com to help with cost forecasting for big deployments, where you want to compare infrastructure options and cloud providers. Also, don't forget that one of the key benefit of using the cloud is elasticity, and unless you model this, you won't get accurate estimates. We developed the notion of elasticity patterns[1] to let users do this, so you can say something like "my baseline S3 storage is 100GB, but every month this grows by 5% and in the Christmas it doubles". [1] http://www.planforcloud.com/pages/docs/patterns.html http://www.planforcloud.com/pages/docs/patterns.html
conoro 14y ago
Finally a summary I can use.
hashtree 14y ago
I'd really love to jump on EC2, but every time I run the numbers it doesn't add up for my usage. I currently colocate all my servers and I wanted to figure out just how much it might cost to potentially switch over to EC2. After much digging and benchmarking, it seems that an single ECU is roughly equivalent to 350 to 400 points on PassMark. With this information and load metrics, it is pretty easy to determine what kind of ECUs I might need to switch over (as RAM and disk are pretty straight forward): http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php. Came to the same conclusion as I did a few years ago. For my scenario (about a rack of servers, established business, 24/7 usage, capacity to handle for a 10-fold increase in usage (and much more within a 2 hour window))... I save roughly $170,000 over 3 years doing it all (server costs included). This is with 3-year reserved instances. It should be noted that I build our servers from the ground up and do all the ops.
- marcuswestin 14y ago
  If you include how much your salary, bonuses, equity and health care costs the business, does it change your calculations?
  - hashtree 14y ago
    It does. The setup took a couple months to research, build, and make "perfect". However, ongoing it takes little time to maintain (less than an hour a week, if averaged). Every three years, I build new servers and place them into service (2 to 3 weeks of time to perform). I also do periodic hardware maintenance roughly every three months (typically 1/4 of a day to perform). Due to the cost savings, we also are able to do quite a bit of redundancy, such as: dual PSUs, SSDs in RAID 10 on non-SAN servers, RAID-Z2/3 on SAN servers, offsite backups, complete server redundancy, spare servers ready to be slotted (I live an hour from colo), spare parts on hand, even multiple physical colos. If components are selected carefully (i.e. sharing components between server roles), regular maintenance is performed, and redundancy is ensured on a per component, per server, and per datacenter level, it's not very time intensive or costly. I am a software engineer by trade, but love the ins and outs of hardware/ops. As such, everything is automated and scripted (that can be). I can raise/move instances in minutes, just like EC2 (currently use XCP). Even with the research, it still saves roughly 100k per 3 years.
edtechdev 14y ago
For a 'small timer' like me used to VPS or dedicated local servers it's still a bit confusing. I don't know how much a value it is, but when looking at PAAS options (like openshift, heroku, appengine, etc.), I like appfog's braindead simple pricing: 2gb free, 4gb $100/month, 16gb $380, etc.
- jeff_carr 14y ago
  I'm not sure if it's ok, but I'll shamelessly plug our cloud: digitalocean.com. We have really straight forward and easy to understand pricing starting at $5. -- Jeff
  - charliepark 14y ago
    I was considering our options for a new setup earlier this month, and considered Linode, AWS, DreamHost's VPS, and DigitalOcean. I found the Amazon pricing so incomprehensible — even though I'm moving an established app, with known traffic and storage — that it was a non-starter. I went with DigitalOcean and — while I'm still getting the server set up — I've been pleased with it so far. The articles on the site that help with setup are really helpful (like Linode's articles, but more up-to-date, and the prices are both good and simple. (I'm not affiliated with them in any way.)
    - mitchtwo 14y ago
      Thanks Charlie! We also offer a pretty nice price comparison chart that breaks down AWS's pricing: https://www.digitalocean.com/price-comparison-chart https://www.digitalocean.com/price-comparison-chart
captaintacos 14y ago
Great way to make the prices clear. 15% more for Japan, I think it's time to move my things back to US East (Virginia) and make some savings. It had some pricing on S3 but I think it would be nice to also have the prices for RDS. A medium-sized one of those things costs as much as a medium EC2 instance (yes I learned that the hard way).
casca 14y ago
Useful, but no reason to go through a redirector which may change. The direct link to the blog post: https://blog.cloudvertical.com/2012/10/aws-cost-cheat-sheet-2/ https://blog.cloudvertical.com/2012/10/aws-cost-cheat-sheet-... The direct link to the PDF with the data: http://s3.amazonaws.com/CloudVerticalBlog/CloudVertical-AWS-Cost-Cheat-Sheet.pdf http://s3.amazonaws.com/CloudVerticalBlog/CloudVertical-AWS-...
mememememememe 14y ago
This is really useful...

174 points by edbyrne 14y ago

JackJ 14y ago

Helpful - thanks

ck2 14y ago

my mini-comparison Cloud Static Storage (cents/gigabyte) site storage bandwidth dreamobjects 7 7 http://dreamhost.com/cloud/dreamobjects/pricing/ cloudfiles 10 18 http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/public/files/pricing/ amazon s3 12.5 12 http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

spindritf 14y ago
What about performance?
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  And reliability. S3 is specced as being very reliable.
jwr 14y ago
You get what you pay for. I used to be a dreamhost customer a couple of years ago, tried to actually use the storage tied to my hosting account. Dreamhost threatened to terminate those accounts that used significant amounts of storage (the storage people supposedly "bought" with their hosting account). I learned my lesson — there is cheap hosting and real hosting. Just as there are "unlimited" data plans (that get capped) and the real ones that you actually pay for. These days I always look for solutions that have a real business model behind them, not overbooked marketing gimmicks. Which means that amazon and rackspace are in, dreamhost is out.

Florin_Andrei 14y ago

The AWS cost structure is byzantine in its complexity. This cheat sheet helps a lot. Thank you.

okrasz 14y ago
Try using http://www.cloudorado.com/ http://www.cloudorado.com/ . You just specify your requirements (RAM, CPU, subscription duration) and it finds appropriate options for you, including reserved, packages, etc. And it will give you price not only of AWS but other clouds a well.

ojbyrne 14y ago

Useful. QA Comment: There's a typo in Instance Sizes, "mirco."

scottyallen 14y ago

This is very useful. Spot instance costs would be really doubly useful, particularly if you can put them alongside on-demand costs.

flyt 14y ago
Spot instance prices change hourly, so they probably don't make sense to add to a static list like this.
- scottyallen 14y ago
  Yep, I understand that. Still, spot pricing it relatively consistent over time, with occasional temporary spikes. A dynamic web version with this format would work too. It's less important to me that I can print it out, since I probably would just end up referring to this online as I need it.

calpaterson 14y ago

Aren't the on-demand prices a bit useless? Doesn't everyone reserve instances?

mfringel 14y ago
Everyone reserves instances, but they do other things, too. You can do a setup based on application demand, such that you have reserved instances for baseline load, and then a mix of spot instances and on-demand instances for load/spikes over baseline.
dagw 14y ago
Depends very much what you're using it for. I do a lot of ad-hoc data processing and use on-demand all the time.
- calpaterson 14y ago
  If you do more than occasional processing, it's probably worth buying at least light utilisation reservation. Most people who use EC2 professionally (and who don't use spot instances) would or should be paying a reserve price
bmelton 14y ago
As dagw said, it pretty much depends on what you're doing. We have dev, test and stage instances that are almost always off. I'm not going to reserve those at all, because I won't generate enough charge on them over the course of a year to even meet the initial payment. For our production instances, yes, obviously we're reserving, but there are lots of cases where you wouldn't. Even with production instances, we occasionally spool up another instance to handle load spikes, for which we don't boot a reserved instance. In another of our apps, we actually spool up a new AWS instance to handle customer requests. The user clicks a button on a website, uploads a (large) file, which we spool up an instance to process for awhile, return the results then shut the instance down. That kind of usage isn't really suitable for reservation.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

jelder 14y ago

Complementary chart: http://www.ec2instances.info/ http://www.ec2instances.info/

bmelton 14y ago
Having built a SaaS app that basically means spinning up a new instance for each customer, I reference ec2instances.info almost daily. I only came into this discussion to post it -- glad to see somebody else already did.

akh 14y ago

Very cool! This is useful for small deployments. We developed PlanForCloud.com to help with cost forecasting for big deployments, where you want to compare infrastructure options and cloud providers. Also, don't forget that one of the key benefit of using the cloud is elasticity, and unless you model this, you won't get accurate estimates. We developed the notion of elasticity patterns[1] to let users do this, so you can say something like "my baseline S3 storage is 100GB, but every month this grows by 5% and in the Christmas it doubles". [1] http://www.planforcloud.com/pages/docs/patterns.html http://www.planforcloud.com/pages/docs/patterns.html

conoro 14y ago

Finally a summary I can use.

hashtree 14y ago

I'd really love to jump on EC2, but every time I run the numbers it doesn't add up for my usage. I currently colocate all my servers and I wanted to figure out just how much it might cost to potentially switch over to EC2. After much digging and benchmarking, it seems that an single ECU is roughly equivalent to 350 to 400 points on PassMark. With this information and load metrics, it is pretty easy to determine what kind of ECUs I might need to switch over (as RAM and disk are pretty straight forward): http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php. Came to the same conclusion as I did a few years ago. For my scenario (about a rack of servers, established business, 24/7 usage, capacity to handle for a 10-fold increase in usage (and much more within a 2 hour window))... I save roughly $170,000 over 3 years doing it all (server costs included). This is with 3-year reserved instances. It should be noted that I build our servers from the ground up and do all the ops.

marcuswestin 14y ago
If you include how much your salary, bonuses, equity and health care costs the business, does it change your calculations?
- hashtree 14y ago
  It does. The setup took a couple months to research, build, and make "perfect". However, ongoing it takes little time to maintain (less than an hour a week, if averaged). Every three years, I build new servers and place them into service (2 to 3 weeks of time to perform). I also do periodic hardware maintenance roughly every three months (typically 1/4 of a day to perform). Due to the cost savings, we also are able to do quite a bit of redundancy, such as: dual PSUs, SSDs in RAID 10 on non-SAN servers, RAID-Z2/3 on SAN servers, offsite backups, complete server redundancy, spare servers ready to be slotted (I live an hour from colo), spare parts on hand, even multiple physical colos. If components are selected carefully (i.e. sharing components between server roles), regular maintenance is performed, and redundancy is ensured on a per component, per server, and per datacenter level, it's not very time intensive or costly. I am a software engineer by trade, but love the ins and outs of hardware/ops. As such, everything is automated and scripted (that can be). I can raise/move instances in minutes, just like EC2 (currently use XCP). Even with the research, it still saves roughly 100k per 3 years.

edtechdev 14y ago

For a 'small timer' like me used to VPS or dedicated local servers it's still a bit confusing. I don't know how much a value it is, but when looking at PAAS options (like openshift, heroku, appengine, etc.), I like appfog's braindead simple pricing: 2gb free, 4gb $100/month, 16gb $380, etc.

jeff_carr 14y ago
I'm not sure if it's ok, but I'll shamelessly plug our cloud: digitalocean.com. We have really straight forward and easy to understand pricing starting at $5. -- Jeff
- charliepark 14y ago
  I was considering our options for a new setup earlier this month, and considered Linode, AWS, DreamHost's VPS, and DigitalOcean. I found the Amazon pricing so incomprehensible — even though I'm moving an established app, with known traffic and storage — that it was a non-starter. I went with DigitalOcean and — while I'm still getting the server set up — I've been pleased with it so far. The articles on the site that help with setup are really helpful (like Linode's articles, but more up-to-date, and the prices are both good and simple. (I'm not affiliated with them in any way.)
  - mitchtwo 14y ago
    Thanks Charlie! We also offer a pretty nice price comparison chart that breaks down AWS's pricing: https://www.digitalocean.com/price-comparison-chart https://www.digitalocean.com/price-comparison-chart

captaintacos 14y ago

Great way to make the prices clear. 15% more for Japan, I think it's time to move my things back to US East (Virginia) and make some savings. It had some pricing on S3 but I think it would be nice to also have the prices for RDS. A medium-sized one of those things costs as much as a medium EC2 instance (yes I learned that the hard way).

casca 14y ago

Useful, but no reason to go through a redirector which may change. The direct link to the blog post: https://blog.cloudvertical.com/2012/10/aws-cost-cheat-sheet-2/ https://blog.cloudvertical.com/2012/10/aws-cost-cheat-sheet-... The direct link to the PDF with the data: http://s3.amazonaws.com/CloudVerticalBlog/CloudVertical-AWS-Cost-Cheat-Sheet.pdf http://s3.amazonaws.com/CloudVerticalBlog/CloudVertical-AWS-...

mememememememe 14y ago

This is really useful...