I'm working on a small personal project with a free-tier account.
I have one linux instance which I have my nodejs app running. The app basically listens for any incoming websocket data and uses AWS SNS to send the data to my iPhone. App needs to access RDS DB that I set up every time this happens.
Today I got an email saying that I used 85% of the usage limit for AWS EBS snapshot storage. I left it for few hours and now it used 100% and it says the Month-end forecasted usage is 3 GB-mo 310.00%.
It seems like this EBS snapshot is just a backup so is there a way to disable this to keep my cost $0? If not, how much will it cost me to run this app? Would moving the RDS DB to ec2 help reduce some cost?
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I'm new to AWS EC2, and I wanted to deploy a web server in it. However I'm concerned about the price because the app will only be used for a few hours per day and I saw in the AWS Calculator that there's a Utilization per month as part of the billing computation https://calculator.aws/#/createCalculator/EC2.
What does the Utilization mean? Let's say I have a running EC2 instance. How do I reduce the charges?
Does it depend on the amount of times the server APIs are invoked in the app? So for the hours that the APIs are NOT being invoked, I won't get charged?
Or
Will it keep on charging me as long as the EC2 instance is running so I should shut it down during idle hours to save up on costs?
Amazon EC2 is charged at an hourly price. The price varies by the Instance Type and the Operating System. Basically, machines with more memory and more CPUs are more expensive, and Windows is more expensive than Linux. There is also a charge for Data Transfer, which is traffic that goes out to the Internet.
If you have a small application, an alternative would be to use Amazon Lightsail, which offers a simple monthly price for both the computer and the traffic.
I've added my response to each of your questions -
What does the Utilization mean? Let's say I have a running EC2 instance. How do I reduce the charges? - You will be charged for the time you let that EC2 instance running, start with a t2.micro under free tier account, you are allowed to run it for 750 hours a month!
Does it depend on the amount of times the server APIs are invoked in the app? So for the hours that the APIs are NOT being invoked, I won't get charged? - No, for EC2, it's the runtime and not the API queries.
Will it keep on charging me as long as the EC2 instance is running so I should shut it down during idle hours to save up on costs? - Shut it down, I would also to setup billing alarms to get an alert once my bill crosses a certain threshold
As long as the servers are up and running you will be charged for it. So yes, you should shut it down during idle hours if you want to save costs.
If you just want to try it out for a simple Rest API server, you can create a new account for a 12-month free tier that will basically entitle you to the smallest 24/7 running (750 hours/month) server.
I've used this server for one of my smaller projects, and it was enough to serve about 100 users in total, with about maximum 10 people coming in and out time to time per day. Had no problem with it.
I have a small single-instance deployment running on an EC2 instance which hosts both a web application and its database (MySQL). I've been looking to separate the deployment out into an EC2 instace for the web app and an RDS cluster for the database, and wanted to take advantage of the new AWS Savings Plans for both if possible.
My questions the are:
AWS Savings Plans seem to only apply to 'pure' compute EC2 instances, not to RDS instances as well. Can someone confirm or disprove this?
If Savings Plans did apply to RDS instances, is there a reason to not use them, and instead just use an Instance Reservation?
Since August 2020, AWS Savings Plans includes:
Amazon EC2
AWS Lambda
AWS Fargate
They do not apply to Amazon RDS db instances. For those, you can continue to use Amazon RDS Reserved Instances.
I want to clarify that even though Savings Plans do not cover RDS instances, they do cover EC2 instances that are part of EMR, ECS and EKS Clusters. Based on this link:
"Both plan types apply to EC2 instances that are a part of Amazon EMR, Amazon EKS, and Amazon ECS clusters. Amazon EKS charges will not be covered by Savings Plans, but the underlying EC2 instances will be. "
Also, Compute Savings Plans also apply to your Fargate and Lambda usage.
We moved to RDS from EC2 instances running self installed MySQL years ago. For me, at has been great. All of the RDS features work flawlessly, point and click, without the mundane work of spinning up, replicating, backing up, and failing over databases. It simply works great. Use reserved instances if you plan on keeping for at least a year. At 30% savings the cost is awash even if you bail on the server after about 9 months and don't use the entire year. Plus you can sell the unused remaining on the marketplace.
Downsides?
You do NOT get command line OS access to the MySQL server. You get an admin login to mySQL. The only way to manage it is through the AWS UI and the mysql client command line or managing client (like MySQL Workbench or Heidi).
You may want to run a mysqldump script on a separate EC2 to dump databases separately/additionally. AWS does SNAPSHOTS which require an entire restore of a sandbox server just to get a single table someone botched up, for example. I go to the MySQLdump files all the time. Never have needed the SNAPSHOT unless I am spinning up a sandbox copy of the entire instance for some reason.
In a nutshell, mySQL on RDS is great.
One other side note. We migrated an app using MySQL5.7 to Aurora MySQL with absolutely zero issues. Complete drop-in replacement (in our case).
I have taken a AWS Lightsail Unix Instance for one of my pilot project, I wanted to explore AWS ecosystem and thought this would be a easy playground to start with. The plan I opted was a USD 5 per month, which gives 1 GB Memory, 1 Core Processor, 40 GB SSD Disk and 2 TB Transfer.
After subscribing I created a LAMP instance and a Plesk Instance, assigned static IPs to both instances and setup connections from my PC to transfer files using PuTTY; also setup access to Plesk and phpMyAdmin to start work.
In the first month itself, I am seeing a huge bill of USD 985 for using AWS RDS, details in bill are as below:
Amazon Relational Database Service for MySQL Community Edition
$1.080 per RDS db.r4.xlarge Multi-AZ instance hour (or partial hour) running MySQL
My question is - When I created LAMP, does it create a AWS RDB service automatically, I have hardly used MySql for anything. It seems AWS Lightsail is throwing hidden charges without notifying customers about actuals.
No, creating a LAMP stack on Lightsail does not create an RDS instance on your behalf. With the LAMP stack on Lightsail, the MySQL database is installed on that instance alongside PHP and Apache - there is no charge beyond the $5.00 / month (in your case) as long as you don't go over the data transfer limit.
I can't say why you're getting charged for RDS, but it's not because you fired up Lightsail instances.
Thank you folks!
I tried to go through several docs AWS provides on pricing. There is no indication that AWS RDB services automatically starts on LAMP installation. I wanted to take second opinion before raising a complaint with them. I have opened a case, and they have confirmed to revert the charges, however there is no clarity how AWS RDS service has started. At present I have removed all DB snapshots and backups.
I am wanting to deploy a Django webapp with a PostgreSQL database to AWS Elastic Beanstalk using this tutorial, but I am so confused about pricing. It says it uses services in the AWS Free Tier, but those seem to be limited to a certain number of hours a month, so how do I make sure I don't go above that threshold? And how do I make sure I'm only using free services? They even require a card on file, so it seems really hard to make sure I don't get charged.
You can do the following configuration to make sure you use AWS Elastic Beankstalk for one year free.
Use only Micro instances for the WebServer and RDS instance.
Limit the scaling of the WebServer maximum to 1 or use Standalone deployment without autoscaling.
When selecting storage, use less than 30GB for EBS and don't enable Provision Throughput.
Apart from these, there are usage base costs for Network, EBS IOPS & etc which includes a free quota and the cost is not considerable when it comes to light use cases.
The AWS Free Tier allows AWS accounts to use a certain amount of services for no charge. Any usage beyond the free tier limits will result in a charge on your credit card.
The Free Tier is intended to provide a trial of AWS services. It is not intended for production use, nor is there any guaranteed way to stay within the free limits. It is up to you to monitor your usage.
There is no such thing as a totally free AWS account.
I have found "Cost Management Preferences" -> "Receive Free Tier Usage Alerts" setting in Billing preferences menu. Hopefully this will be enough for a small personal projects with low usage. I would guess it is not enough for large projects since this is only a notification.
In short, you can absolutely make sure that your app stays free, just not from within the AWS interface. You'll have to use your own usage monitoring to ensure you stay within the free limits as others state.
As Ashan said, this is a pretty silly approach since fees are nominal and the alternative is a loss of service, however, AWS does offer APIs to help you do this through CloudWatch.
CloudWatch exposes pretty much all of the billable metrics on a service-by-service basis, for example here are the metrics for EC2, and here are the metrics for S3. After starting your services through beanstalk, just look up all the services you're using via the billing page of the AWS console, look up the CloudWatch APIs for each, then check them.
At least for EC2, there are even customizable alarms and actions, including shutting down the instance. See the Monitoring tab at the bottom of the EC2 console. Not sure, but you might have to manually throw status updates to their status system for some of the other metrics. If so, it's not that difficult. You'd set up an access key for some IAM identity so you can check CloudWatch stuff from command line. Then, you'd write a watchdog script to run on that instance using AWSCLI to regularly ping CloudWatch and call your shutdown code or modify your status if you're over some percentage of your quota.
I am new to the Amazon Cloud. I need to take a EBS snapshot of 150 GB data and I am on a metered bandwidth (say 30 GB/month). I am aware EBS snapshots take few hours to complete.
I need to know whether I can log off the Amazon dashboard and shut down my PC once I trigger the snapshot creation process through AWS Dashboard OR should my PC be kept turned ON during the entire process. Does it require my system to be connected to the internet until snapshot creation process is complete? My PC runs on a metered bandwidth and hence this query...
You do not have to keep your computer on when performing this kind of operation. The snapshot creation is handled by AWS servers.
Unless you are uploading or downloading large portions of data to and from AWS (which is not your case), you do not need to be connected to the infrastructure at all after you submit the request.