After a first glance at the Amazon EC2 pricing page, you might find absorbing so much information a little intimidating. In this post, we will try to break EC2 pricing down and provide strategies to not only ease the pain but also save your organization money.
First and foremost, you would need to answer the following questions regarding your project:
With the above answered we can now get down to the nitty-gritty details and start figuring out costs.
EC2 Machine + Block Store + Optional Software + Bandwidth + Optional Services
EC2 pricing can now seem pretty straightforward. With information from questions 1&3, you can use the flow chart below to pick the correct tier. First though, a quick overview of tiers:
a Basic type of virtual machine, you pay by the hour, and the machine will stay up as long as the hardware is functioning (i.e., Amazon won’t turn it off)
This machine is basically on a contract, so you’re buying it for 12/24/36 months, to run 24/7/365. This can provide significant savings, especially for longer-term contracts
These instances are much cheaper, sometimes up to 60% below On-demand instance costs. They are purchased by the hour, and as the name suggests on the spot (i.e. at the time you spin up the machine). The downside is they can be brought down by Amazon at any time, with no warning
Block Store Pricing comes into effect when the answer to question four is yes.
There are two types of Amazon EC2 storage: Instance Level storage and EBS.
EC2 pricing for Block Store is charged based on GB per month. There are also High performance and backup options available
I won’t go too deeply into this topic, as it really deserves its own post. But basically, you can purchase software from the AWS marketplace to run on your machines and pay per hour of use.
Think Oracle, Windows or Red Hat.
Your answer to question two should help you with this section.
In essence, Intra-AWS transfers within the same availability zone are free (one exception is using a public IP since effectively you are going out to the internet and coming back in).
Internet inbound is free, Internet outbound costs money
Amazon offers services such as Monitoring and Load balancing, which have structures independent of Amazon EC2 pricing and are usually charged hourly in addition to the machine costs.
If you’re interested in learning more about EC2 cost saving, read this post where we show you three ways to cut your EC2 costs on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
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