
Ask HN: How do you monitor your AWS costs? - julienba
With the increasing usage of automation it&#x27;s getting more and more easy to deploy a lot of cloud resources and the cost attach to it increase as well. So I wonder how do you keep track of it ?
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chatmasta
Early and often. When designing a system, you have a choice to use AWS for all
of it, some of it, or none of it. You need to calculate the tradeoffs of AWS
(increased price) over other solutions. Just like you think about which
database to use, or how to cluster components, you should also think about how
much deployment will cost.

"How much will this cost" should not be calculated as an afterthought, but
rather from the beginning, at the same time you're answering all other
architectural questions.

If you've calculated the cost from the beginning, you may as well track costs
in your monitoring code and metrics system. For example if you've had 10 VMs
running the last hour, log the price of them to your metrics system. Then you
can graph prices along with any other metric and see how bottlenecks drive
cost.

Try to anticipate the bottlenecks of your system, and see if there's an easy
way to avoid AWS for those components. That is, if you're an image host, you
probably don't want to pay per GB of bandwidth at AWS when you can pay per
capacity at any dedicated/colo provider.

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bradhe
I use Cloudability. [https://cloudability.com](https://cloudability.com)

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WheelsAtLarge
This is the question for most cost/time services. Most of them refuse to put
in a real time meter or hard stop after x usage. It goes against their
business model. They much rather argue overage than limit usage from their
side.

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Arbinv
www.parkmycloud.com

