I am confused on forecasted billing charges at my AWS trial account. I did terminated the instances but still its showing like this:
I want to know how I can reduce this cost? What exactly causing the cost?
You created some snapshots (backups) of the EBS disk volume of your instance. These snapshots are not deleted when you delete the instance. You need to go into the EC2 console and find the EBS snapshot section and delete the snapshots if you want to stop getting charged for them.
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I once tried to study AWS in free-trial months. After I stopped accessing this account, I noticed that I was billed for AWS. The billing management console says that I was billed for using "EBS". How can I delete these services?
I searched in a search box "EBS" but didn't find any.
I thought it might be these two and deleted all the volumes in the region, but I am not sure.
Yes. Those are the only 2 you could be paying up for, assuming you had not performed any fast restores or used the EBS direct APIs.
https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing/
Volumes and their snapshot, even if not in use, still incur storage costs.
Your free trial probably ended or you were using more than what the free tier allowed.
If you have deleted all volumes and snapshots, you will not incur any more costs.
Volumes and Snapshots are under the EBS section on the EC2 Page -
Actually I have to take forecast of costing for one my instance, which is having a number of volumes attached... These volumes are different in size and types.
Let's suppose I took the AMI backup and terminated the server.
Now my confusion is how would I calculate the cost. The cost will be calculated based on pricing of Amazon EBS Volumes or Amazon EBS Snapshot. Because the cost difference is just double.
Let me know if you can help me understanding.
pricing of Amazon EBS Volumes or Amazon EBS Snapshot Which I took from AWS Pricing :
https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing/
Amazon EBS snapshots are a complex subject due to the way they work.
There is a detailed explanation in: Amazon EBS snapshots - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
A quick summary is:
Snapshots contain only the data that is different to previous snapshots (they are incremental)
An AMI is actually a snapshot. So, if you booted a new Amazon EC2 instance from an AMI and then created a snapshot, the snapshot would contain very little since most of the volume was already contained in the previous snapshot (that was part of the AMI). Confused yet?
Any snapshot can be deleted and information will still be retained to allow any other snapshot to be restored. So, the snapshot is actually an 'index' to the snapshot data, and the snapshot data is stored separately to the snapshot itself. You should be questioning your sanity at this point!
So, the cost of Amazon EBS snapshots is mostly based on how much the contents of the volume changes, and how many snapshots (effectively, points-in-time) you wish to keep. If you only keep the most recent snapshot, then all data will be available, but the cost will be minimised because it won't keep any data that has been deleted from the volume.
Bottom line: Snapshots take less space than the data on a volume due to the incremental natures. The more snapshots ("points-in-time"), the more data will be kept and hence the more cost.
It seems that my EC2 usage limit is being reached rather quickly. I have deleted all of my EC2 instances and most of my S3 buckets, and none of my EC2 instances even exist in the terminated state. Are there any other services other than EC2 that use the EBS storage? Thanks in advance.
Amazon EBS is only used by Amazon EC2 instances. (Well, it is also used by Amazon RDS, but it shows up as an RDS charge, not EBS.)
We are currently about a third of the way through the month, so you'd want to be around 30% of usage.
The Amazon EBS snapshot usage is ahead of that (58%). If this worries you, then you can delete snapshots under the Snapshots section in the EC2 console. Amazon Machines Images (AMIs) also use EBS snapshots, so check the Images section too.
The amounts are "growing" because they are based on a month of usage. So, 1GB for 1 day is ~ 3% of the month's total.
However, there is little need to panic — EBS Snapshots are charged at 5c/GB/month, so at the current rate of usage you might be charged 10c.
There can be another possibility where you run an instance with EBS volumes 'not deleted' even after the termination of instance, it can accrue storage charges also. So delete those ones also in the 'Volumes' section of EC2 instance if its still unused.
I'm starting with AWS and I've been taking my first steps on EC2 and EBS. I've learnt about EBS snapshots but I still don't understand if the backups, once you've created a snapshot, are managed automatically by AWS or I need to do them on my own.
AWS just introduced a new feature called Lifecycle Manager (in the EC2 Dashboard, at the bottom left) that allows you to create automated backups for your volumes. Once you configure a policy, AWS will handle the backup process for your volumes.
This is only a couple of weeks old so just wanted to mention here.
Snapshots are managed by AWS
snapshot of an EBS volume, can be used as a baseline for new volumes or for data backup. If you make periodic snapshots of a volume, the snapshots are incremental—only the blocks on the device that have changed after your last snapshot are saved in the new snapshot. Even though snapshots are saved incrementally,
the built in durability of EBS is comparable to a RAID in the physical sense. The data itself is mirrored (think more like a RAID stripe though) in the availability zone where the volume exists. Amazon states that the failure rate is somewhere around 0.1-0.5% annually. This is more reliable than most physical RAID setups
I created some EBS volumes on some Linux instances. Then I terminated the instances but the volumes were still there (I forgot to check the Delete on Termination setting).
When I went to billing I saw that I was charged for the IOPS of those EBS volumes -- approximately US$8. So then I removed them, even though they were no longer attached to the instances (they were just there but with an available state).
Today after almost a day without EBS volumes in my AWS account I see that the billing is US$13!!! I checked the billing details and it all charged to IOPS of the EBS volumes even though I already removed them yesterday! I need to stop this right away.
I opened a case yesterday in AWS and the case is still unassigned. Anybody knows how EBS volumes are being charged? HELP! Thank you!
Sometimes AWS support takes some time to get back to you, this depends on your support level. If you have the free tier it may take 48 hours.
EBS is charged monthly and the charges do not instantly show up. So more than likely the $8-$13 charge was already there when you terminated the volumes.
You can view the EBS pricing here: https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing/