AWS Pricing Model and FREE TIER
In this article, we will discuss the AWS pricing model, at the end you should be able to understand how you are being billed for your provisioned resource on AWS.
The AWS pricing model offers you a Pay-as-you-go approach, this means that you will only pay for what you use, You must consider that you will pay for EVERYTHING on AWS not just for provisioned compute, you will pay even for Data Transfer, the affirmation “you will only pay for what you use” it can take you into a mistake, let’s see why:
you can provision an EBS volume with 20GB of capacity and use only 1GB, will I be billed for using 1GB or 20GB? what do you think at this point?
Well, the answer is that you will be billed for 20GB.
Which are the pricing models used by AWS to bill?
- On Demand
- Reservation
- Spot Instances and Dedicated hosts
On Demand
With EC2 On-Demand Instances, you pay for compute capacity per hour or per second (only Linux Instances are able to be billed per second), with RDS you pay for compute capacity per hour only.
How to calculate the pricing of an EC2 instance? Let’s see an example, Suppose that you will run two small Linux Web Servers with Apache:
First than all let’s see the AWS EC2 On Demand Pricing List
1 t3.micro Inst for Prod Env
1 t3.micro Inst for Dev Env
So, let’s calculate how much will cost an instance running 365 days (8.760 hours approx) for production, we will need the dev env only in the business hours it is approximately 2.080 hours per year, after the biz hours you can just shut down your instance and you will not be billed until you start up again the EC2 inst.
Pricing for Prod env with t3.micro $0.0104 USD * 8760 = $91 USD year
Pricing for Dev env with t3.micro $0.0104 USD * 2080 = $21,6 USD year
Total = $112,6 USD year
But wait, that’s not enough to deploy your server, you will need an EBS volume minimum with 20 GB , Let’s see the AWS EBS pricing
Pricing for Prod env with 20GB provisioned ($0.10*20GB)*12 Months = $24 USD
Pricing for Dev env with 20GB provisioned ($0.10*20GB)*12 Months = $24 USD
Total = $48 USD
So, the entire deployment will cost to you yearly $160,6 USD approx.
¡important! You must be careful because there could be some hidden costs like unused provisioned EBS.
Reserved Instances
The reserved instances provide you with a significant discount (up to 75 percent) compared to On-Demand Instance pricing.
This is highly suggested when you have a predictable workload, you can pay all upfront for 1 or 3 years, let’s compare how much cheaper could be a reserved instance for 1 year instead of paying on-demand.
You will save approximately $32 USD (41%) reserving and paying all upfront.
Spot instances
Amazon EC2 Spot Instances let you take advantage of unused EC2 capacity in the AWS cloud. Spot Instances are available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices. You can use Spot Instances for various stateless, fault-tolerant, or flexible applications such as big data, containerized workloads, this is because AWS could claim this instance at any moment and the data persisted on the instance will be be lost.
Let’s see at the moment of writing this article how cheaper is an instance t3.micro, remember that spot instances is like a stock market where the price depends of the supply and demand.
Right now the instance t3.micro cost $0.0031 per Hour is 50% more cheaper than a reserved instance, the price yearly is approximately $27 USD.
Another resources that will be billed on demand monthly and could not be reserved
Data transfer
In most cases, there is no charge for inbound data transfer or for data transfer between other AWS services within the same region.
Each service has different pricings for data transfer, as we talk at the beginning of this article you will be billed for EVERYTHING.
Let’s see two examples
AWS ALB will bill every GB processed even if it is inbound data transfer.
On the other hand we have AWS S3, in this case we will not be billed for the inbound data transfer just only for outbound data transfer, write — read requests and Storage Usage.
The AWS Free tier
Until now we were talking about how much money we will spend on AWS, but is important talk about the AWS free tier.
There is a lot of services that has a free tier for one year and others that are always free.
With the free tier you can deploy your t3.micro EC2 instance FOR FREE 1 year, AWS will gift you 750 hours monthly
