A Comprehensive Guide To Understand How AWS Pricing Works
Today, in this AWS Pricing blog, we will be discussing less of what AWS is, and more about how it emerged as a winner and leader in the Cloud Computing industry.
Have you ever wondered why a particular service is more successful than the others? Let’s think this the other way around. When would you pick one service over the other?
I can think of a couple of reasons, like
- Customer Friendliness
- Not too heavy on the pocket
- If I can see how everything works without paying first.
There could be a lot more, but I’m sure these would be the foremost.
Having said that, can you guess which service is the most successful among the Cloud Providers?
It is Amazon Web Services.
How successful is it? Well, it is estimated that AWS has around 10 times the capacity than its top 14 closest rivals combined!
Woah! That’s some number, ain’t it? Now, why do you think it is so successful? Let’s see if they have covered our bucket list.
- Customer Friendliness
Amazon claims that it is the most customer obsessed company in the world, and if you have ever shopped on Amazon, you would know that too.
- Not heavy on the pocket
AWS Pricing offers the most amazing options, you can rent a server for as low as 5$ a month!
- Demo first, pay later
AWS has been very generous in this, it offers this incredible free tier option, and to call it a demo would be an insult, why? Be patient, we have covered everything.
So why is it so successful is pretty clear, AWS leaves no stone unturned to keep their customers happy, and this is reflected in AWS pricing, let’s see how.
Pay as you Go
AWS offers, pay as you go, model, that is you only pay what you use.
Let’s take an example to understand this:
Suppose you are using say 10GB of space on AWS infrastructure, now usually what happens is, you estimate your usage say 40GB, reserve it, and pay for that 40GB monthly. But what if you are not using the whole 40GB. Like in our example, you just have 10GB of data, so if you are using AWS, you just pay for that 10GB, and you can always store more as your requirements grow, there is no restriction!
Payless by using more
Confusing? But it’s true. AWS bills you for the hour. The more AWS resources you use, the less the hourly rates become.
Save when you reserve
Though AWS has on-demand instances, but in services like AWS EC2 and RDS you have an option of reserving your instances as well, for a specific time frame. Why would you reserve? You can reduce your costs up to 75 percent when you use reserved instances compared to On Demand instances.
Pricing Models
Having said that, there are 3 different pay models when you use Reserved Instances:
- No Upfront
- Partial Upfront
- Full Upfront
Let’s discuss each one of these:
No Upfront
- In No upfront, you don’t pay anything before you reserve the instance, but since there is no advance payment, the costs are higher than the other two options.
Partial Upfront
- In Partial Upfront, you pay a partial amount when you are reserving the instance, the costs in this model are lesser as compared to No upfront, but is still more expensive than full upfront.
Full Upfront
- In Full Upfront, you pay the whole amount when you are reserving the instance, and the pricing is least in this case since you are paying the full payment.
Calculate your savings
AWS offers two types of calculators for you to foresee what will be your expenses:
- AWS Calculator
- TCO Calculator
AWS Calculator
AWS Calculator is used to calculating your monthly expenses, it can be used to foresee, what will be your expenditure if you use a certain set of resources, it also provides you with templates to appraise complete solutions.
TCO Calculator
TCO(Total Cost of Ownership) Calculator is used to compare one service’s price to another, or one infrastructure solution to the other, it matches your current infrastructure to the most cost-efficient AWS offerings.
AWS Free Tier
Let’s talk about the most exciting part of AWS pricing first, that is the AWS Free tier. They are offered by AWS to their customers so that they can get hands-on on AWS services so that they would know what they will be paying for.
The free tier from AWS offer two kinds of free service
- Introductory
- Non-Expiring
The Introductory free tier is given to all AWS customers on their SignUp, and it is valid for 12 months from the day they register on AWS.
The following are the services and their features that are included in the free tier:
Amazon EC2
- It offers 750 hours of free Windows or Linux t2.micro instance usage per month.
- So you can either run 1 instance for 750 hours for one month or two instances for half a month.
Amazon S3
- It offers 5GB of standard storage on S3
- 20,000 Get requests
- 2,000 Put requests
Amazon RDS
- 750 hours of free db.t2.micro instance
- 20 GB of DB storage: any combination of SSD or Magnetic
- 20GB of backups with RDS Magnetic storage
- 10,000,000 IOs
Amazon CloudFront
- 50GB Data Transfer Out,
- 2,000,000 HTTP and HTTPS requests of CloudFront.
Data Transfer
- 15GB of data transfer out aggregated out of all AWS services.
The non-expiring free tier does not expire even after 12 months, and includes the following services:
AWS Lambda
- 1,000,000 free requests per month
- 3.2 million seconds of computing time per month
AWS KMS
- 20,000 free requests per month
Amazon SES
- 62,000 outbound messages per month to any recipient when you call Amazon SES.
- 1000 inbound messages per month.
Amazon CloudWatch
- 10 Amazon CloudWatch custom metrics, 1,000,000 API requests.
- 5GB of log data ingestion.
- 5GB of log data Archive.
- 3 Dashboards with up to 50 metrics each per month.
DynamoDB
- 25GB of storage
- 25 Units of read capacity and 25 units write capacity
Since pricing changes for AWS resources pretty often, you can get the updated pricing for all AWS resources or services from the Pricing page of AWS.
So that’s it, guys! I hope you enjoyed this AWS Pricing blog. The knowledge of how AWS pricing works is a must for any AWS Solution Architect Professional.
If you wish to check out more articles on the market’s most trending technologies like Artificial Intelligence, DevOps, Ethical Hacking, then you can refer to Edureka’s official site.
Do look out for other articles in this series which will explain the various other aspects of AWS.
1. AWS Tutorial
2. AWS EC2
3. AWS Lambda
5. AWS S3
6. AWS Console
7. AWS RDS
9. AWS Fargate
10. Amazon Lex
11. Amazon Lightsail
12. AWS Resume
13. Amazon Athena
14. AWS CLI
15. AWS vs Azure
17. On-premise vs Cloud computing
19. How To Restore EC2 From Snapshot?
20. AWS CodeCommit
21.Top AWS Architect Interview Questions
Originally published at www.edureka.co on December 19, 2016.
