
AWS Costs Cheat Sheet - edbyrne
http://dmin.es/aws-cheatsheet
======
hashtree
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>.

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
If you include how much your salary, bonuses, equity and health care costs the
business, does it change your calculations?

~~~
hashtree
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.

~~~
dhimes
These kinds of numbers scare the shit out of me. Here I am thinking a couple
of linodes may cover what I want (am intrigued by uptano
(<https://uptano.com/>) linked above though).

How do I go about estimating my real needs? I mean, I hope you are running
some major stuff for money whereby you _save_ $60K a year. Holy shit!

~~~
hashtree
It speaks more towards the outlandish expense of EC2 (for us) than it does the
true actual expense.

A few things:

Eliminate the middle men. Who do the small/medium datacenters use to build
their custom hosting hardware? It's likely someone like Ma Labs where you get
quite a savings over Amazon/Newegg, particularly when you buy components for
many servers at a time.

Pay in advance, when it makes sense and is possible. Talk to colo operators,
you can likely get a better deal if you pay for 1/3 years up front.

When you build the hardware yourself, you can do things no operator can do for
you... tailor it exactly for your own domain needs.

Analyzing your domain needs to define server roles that you might need (e.g.
load balancer, app server, relational database, hadoop cluster, nosql
database, key/value stores like redis, etc) will lead you to commonalities in
hardware/components needs. Now you can develop a few physical server types,
order in bulk, and not have to keep so many spare components on hand.

For us, we are able to split out our datacenters by "critical"/"non-critical"
for huge cost savings. Our "critical" datacenters host traditional production
level servers. Things that MUST have up times of four/five nines. We can get
50Mbps 95th percentile, quarter rack, 10 amp for roughly $400 a month. These
are great, but you have to make the most of each U.

We do a lot of machine learning, map/reduce, and general processing. The app
needs this, but because I coded for it... if the uptime is, say, 99% and not
99.9999% it has VERY little impact on our end users (think of these as worker
dynos). Now, I can have a whole rack here at the office able to handle for 90%
of outages without issue. The nice thing about this is, I no longer have to
make the most of each U. I can now build servers completely different than I
would in a traditional datacenter. It also comes with little added expense to
our normal operations (add redundant internet, networking, UPSes, and
insurance). I can build a 1u, 25 ECU-equiv, 32GB, SSD based server for ~1.1k.
Fill the rack! :)

~~~
dhimes
These sound like excellent pointers. Do you have such large needs because of
the type of pages/apps you are serving (streaming, for instance, or heavy
analytical processes in the ML), or simply because you have a helluva lot of
users?

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casca
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-...](https://blog.cloudvertical.com/2012/10/aws-cost-cheat-
sheet-2/)

The direct link to the PDF with the data:
[http://s3.amazonaws.com/CloudVerticalBlog/CloudVertical-
AWS-...](http://s3.amazonaws.com/CloudVerticalBlog/CloudVertical-AWS-Cost-
Cheat-Sheet.pdf)

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jelder
Complementary chart:

<http://www.ec2instances.info/>

~~~
bmelton
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.

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

~~~
okrasz
Try using <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.

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ck2
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
What about performance?

~~~
dredmorbius
And reliability.

S3 is specced as being _very_ reliable.

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edtechdev
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
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
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.)

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akh
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>

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

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captaintacos
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).

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

~~~
flyt
Spot instance prices change hourly, so they probably don't make sense to add
to a static list like this.

~~~
scottyallen
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.

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

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dagw
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
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

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conoro
Finally a summary I can use.

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JackJ
Helpful - thanks

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mememememememe
This is really useful...

