Tips for estimating AWS costs
Amazon Calculator:
Amazon Calculator
Gather requirements
Map requirements to services
Right-size service choices
Evaluate pricing-model options
Use the Simple Monthly Calculator
Deliver *estimate* (educated guess)
Gather requirements
- Hardest part
- Location
- Duration
- Availability
- Operating system
- Prioritize Compute and Storage
EC2 will be the majority of the cost
Choose Instance type
- Start with memory requirements and architecture type (32 / 64 bit)
- then choose virtual cores required
- then select between alternatives based on use-case
Reserved instances may be cost effective but pay for the life of the instance even if you cancel it.
- if rates go down you'll get the lower rate going forward, but no refund on prior usage
Spot instances are good for map reduce jobs - bid for an instance, pay a lower cost, but instances can be terminated at any time.
Look for peak IOPS storage requirements for various components of solution and size EBS pIOPS and choose EBS-Optimized instances accordingly. Look at logs for SAN, database usage, etc to determine usage.
- based on specific work load
- database will have different IOPS requirements at different times
Pick the right region -- prices vary.
Detailed monitoring is every 1 minute instead of every 5 minutes. Costs more.
Data transfer in is always free. Data transfer out is not. May be able to estimate data transfer out looking at firewalls.
Storage on instance is ephemeral - will go away with your instance. Storage on EBS volume will remain if stop instance so you'll want EBS storage in addition to instance storage for most applications.
When selecting an instance take a look at dives - SSD vs other and IO - High, Medium, etc.
