
RDS Pricing Has More Than Doubled - craigkerstiens
https://medium.com/@rbranson/rds-pricing-has-more-than-doubled-ef8c3b7e5218
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matwood
Clickbait title. RDS pricing has doubled relative to the instance pricing. RDS
absolute pricing has gone down, just not as much as the instance pricing. RDS
may have some fixed cost (or slower moving variable cost) component separate
from the raw instance cost.

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rbranson
I’d buy the fixed cost argument if the premium % decreased as the instance
size increased. It doesn’t.

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jen20
Your article does not support the idea of the cost having doubled - hence (I
assume) the suggestion of clickbait.

In order to show that the pricing has doubled, you'd need to show an increase
in actual monetary cost to a customer, not that the margins have changed. The
table of prices has no historical data, making change impossible to determine.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that RDS is overpriced, but can't say I'm
convinced by this article alone.

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rbranson
RDS is a value-add on top of EC2. Therefore its actual price is the extra
premium.

If a food delivery company doubles their fees from 10% to 20% and the
restaurant cuts its price proportionally, do you really say the delivery price
is the same?

The total cost remains the same but the value the customer receives from the
delivery service per dollar spent has been cut in half.

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tbarbugli
70% is still a pretty good deal.

Back when RDS did not have Postgresql supported, our dev team build something
similar on top of EC2, EBS, Wal-e (S3) and XFS.

It was a lot of work to get all the moving parts working nicely; lot of
testing to perfect all procedures and I can tell you, it was no fun at all
when we got the instance shutdown email notification from AWS (or if you
wanted to spin a new server from snapshot / upgrade instance type, ...)

Here's a list of things that you get with RDS:

\- Somebody else will make sure that failover, snapshotting, backup recovery
work. If you use EC2 this is going to be something you need to test
periodically (unless you like bad surprises)

\- Automated failover election mechanism

\- Logging integrates with S3 out of the box

\- Proxy (no need to run your own pgbouncer anymore)

\- Engine upgrades work with replicase and multi-az failovers

The list is much longer than this but my point is: the amount of overhead that
comes with running PG on EC2 is high and does not improve that much over time
(probably the opposite is true if you consider that developers/DBAs come and
go).

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rbranson
Not saying it’s a bad deal. RDS is a great service. I’m saying that suddenly
doubling the cost of a service is not a good look unless the value delivered
is also doubled. As a customer, in what situation would you find this
acceptable?

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mstolpm
I seem to miss something here? If RDS went from $0,465 to $0,342 per hour as
shown in the table, that’s roughly a decrease by one third in cost for me.
Where does the „suddenly doubling the cost“ part come from? Isn’t it that the
total cost for me decrease, just not at the rate of other AWS offerings?

~~~
rbranson
As much as AWS wants you to believe otherwise, the actual price of RDS as a
value-add is its premium on top of EC2 pricing.

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outime
RDS is quite expensive, even for the peace of mind it gives.

I used to work on a big enterprise which had many talented engineers and it
was clear that RDS for the many dozens of teams wouldn’t be the best idea
(money-wise) and so a custom HA solution was built and saved a lot of money.

At a certain scale it may be a good idea to find alternatives but as usual
YMMV.

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jakozaur
Aurora got even more premium over MySQL RDS:

r5.large: Aurora got 20% premium over MySQL

1\. Aurora: $0.29 / hour

2\. MySQL: $0.24 / hour

Though Aurora you don't need to manually provision disk space and can have
higher performance.

[https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/pricing/)

[https://aws.amazon.com/rds/mysql/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/rds/mysql/pricing/)

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draklor40
RDS is expensive, but for a small team of 5 devs (my current setup) it is an
amazing solution.

Scaling up and down the database is as simple clicking a button on the UI,
which we used quite effectively when our services saw a sudden spike in the
load. We were able to scale down the same way after the spike dropped.

We still had to tune our queries and indices so that we weren't paying the
cost over the long term, but the peace of mind that comes with not having to
figure out why your database went down when there is no one in the office is a
huge win-win.

We currently also manage an OLD version of Cassandra and Elasticsearch and we
are also looking to migrate to the new managed version of Cassandra. At the
end of the day, the extra cost for RDS even for small teams, is much lower
than the cost in terms of developer-hours * cost per hour for developer.

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ldoughty
2 issues ...

1) db.m3.Large, db.m4.large, and db.m5.large are all around $130/month, no
where near a 20% difference between any one of them.. so to not enough
information to find this supposed 78% premium

2) AWS is totally for the cost concerned.... But you can't just lift and
shift... That's exactly how NOT to save money. I run many projects out of AWS
for less than $5/month ... Which is the usual expected cost for a web server.
If you can leverage something like Dynamo DB for your DB you can get cheaper
databases

However, everything in AWS is a pricing game. API gateway is cheap until you
get to 5 million requests pet month, then you should look at ELB proxy...
Unless you really need API gateway's additional features... Though HTTP proxy
just came out and I think that is a good replacement for many people for API
gateway which reduce costs 70% and makes it a good low cost front end listener
up to 15 million requests or so before you may want to consider a load
balancer instead (of course, assuming the features line up with needs)

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rbranson
The RDS premium % is the same across the entire instance class. The pricing is
all public. It’s simple math.

~~~
ldoughty
The article said m3 to m5 went up 78%, I don't see that.

Another reader pointed out the author is comparing on demand ec2 to RDS...
That wasn't clear to me when I made my statement. Party my fault for not
reading the table, it's rather small on my phone.

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QuinnyPig
Not that it justifies the increasing margin, but cross-AZ data transfer is 2¢
a gigabyte when using EC2, but is free for RDS replication.

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PaulKeeble
10 years ago developers and ops people were a lot more concerned about being
locked into proprietary products especially to the sort of level of
integration AWS brings.

Eventually I suspect Amazon will be all but required to chase the money and at
that point a lot of companies will really struggle to get off it. OS/360 is
still going, still charging a fortune for a mainframe.

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jjirsa
Clearly RDS prints money - doesn’t take a genius to realize AWS has been
trying to duplicate that success with every other OSS db-aaS they’ve launched
since.

Given its success, lack of pricing pressure makes sense - until users go away,
there’s little reason to decrease margins.

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billman
For someone coming from shops that mostly ran Oracle, RDS pricing is a beyond
awesome.

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ykevinator
Same experience with document dB. Its wound up being a fraction of the cost to
roll out 3 auto scaling ec2 boxes. Literally a tenth of the cost.

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andrewaylett
Except it's not, not really -- it's just not kept pace with the decrease in
underlying EC2 cost. It still costs less now for an RDS instance than it did
before.

The premium over raw EC2 has gone up -- from $0.115/h to $0.15/hour -- but
that's only a 30% jump. The total cost has gone down by $0.123/hour, which is
~25%.

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nickthemagicman
Are there any alternatives that are cheaper though?

