Track IOPS cost for EC2 instance - amazon-web-services

I have an instance hosted on Amazon EC2 where the C drive has the following configuration :
Volume type = io1 , IOPS= 2700 .
I was checking the monthly bill and i came across the following cost :
$0.0650000001 per IOPS-month provisioned -US West (Oregon) (blended price)*
4,132.083 IOPS-Mo $268.59 .
Then i started checking the volume via cloud watch (average IOPS counts for each minute) to understand when this IOPS consumption happens on a daily basis
I am confused about the parameters to choose while showing the graph (average ? , sum ? or what it exactly the way to proceed) .
Another graph i made is the consumption during the entire month
But this one is not helping as it is saying i have average consumption less than 200 IOPS on the 26th which is in contradiction with the graph above .
Do you have any better idea to track on the cloud watch my IOPS consumption with parameters that are reflecting the reality to help me make decision .

The dashboard was showing that i am not consuming the allocated IOPS . I then changed the configuration of my Volume to be gp2 instead of io1 . I did not notice any bottleneck since then . You will notice that this alarm supposed to monitor the consumption of IOPS called VolumeConsumedReadWriteOps (Count) is not available for volumes of type gp2.
Here is a great article detailing why you may waste your money on provisioned IOPS .

Related

Why does AWS RDS still shows burst balance 0 with disk size 2TB gp2?

According to what I know about gp2 from AWS docs (link), gp2 disks have burst capabilily when they are smaller than 1000GB.
After disk is bigger 1000GB, baseline performance exceeeds 3000 IOPS burst performance, so that "burst" term cannot apply.
However, as I see on my current prod database with 2TB gp2 storage, burst balance still somehow apply to me, and storage is considerably faster while burst balance is more than 0.
Apparently, there are changes in AWS Burst term. Does anybody knows modern terms, so I can plan my hardware accordingly?
I made request to AWS support about this.
It was a lengthy thread where I got to know several important facts.
I have saved my conversation at this link, so it's not lost for community.
Answer: burts balance may still apply for storage bigger than 1TB, because there may be several volumes to serve storage space. If volume is smaller than 1TB - burst balance gets utilized for that volume.
Other facts that were obscure for me:
database may look like it's capped by IOPS limits (due internal IOPS submerge operation), but in reality it may be capped by network throughput.
network throughput is gueranteed by EBS-Optimized. At RDS docs you won't find explicit tables how instances relate to throughput, but it's there on EBS docs
For some of the instances that are nitro-based, EBS-Optimized allows to work at maximum throughput for class for 30 minutes each 24 hours. For smaller instances it means that for 30 minutes database may go skyrocket performance, comprared to poor baseline.
I've run into that issue with EFS, provisioning enough capacity (storage and throughput) is one thing, provisioning burst capacity is something else. In this case it appears that you are running into the same issue. Exceeding your burst capacity. If you have a read-heavy application, consider using a replica or a caching scheme. Alternatively you can increase your 2TB disk to 4TB or look into provisioned iops solution.
From the screen capture, I can see that AWS is already delivering the performance they promised for your instance ( 6K IOPS, consistently )
So the question remains is why there is still burst performance that let you burst up to > 11K IOPS ( the 7:00 - 9:00 timeframe ) for a limitted time
My guess is that the 3K IOPS burst limit is only for instances with less than 1TB. For instance of bigger size, you can burst up to "Baseline performance + 3k IOPS" ( around 9k in your case ) until the IO credit runs out. I have not seen any document around this though

Does increasing the index cause the write IOPS of AWS RDS to rise?

Does increasing the index cause the write IOPS of AWS RDS to rise?
The AWS RDS I use is db.m3.xlarge . The storage of RDS is 50G.
Now the write IOPS of AWS RDS is 120
50G RDS write IOPS peak is 150
According to the Official document :
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/CHAP_Storage.html
Baseline I/O performance for General Purpose SSD storage is 3 IOPS for each GiB, which means that larger volumes have better performance.
How do I query the reason why RDS write IOPS rises?
Let me try to answer this by dividing it into two parts :
Do I have a I/O Problem ?
Finding reason behind high write IOPS on MySQL (RDS) server ?
Do I have a I/O Problem ?
When using AWS RDS, one does not have traditional OS tools such as systat, iostat, dtstat or sar. The tool to understand what is happening in RDS is cloudwatch metrics and the graphs provided.
Read and Write IOPS metrics:
By summing up the ReadIOPS and WriteIOPS you will see how much IOPS your operations consume.
DiskQueueDepth Metric: The DiskQueueDepth metric provides the number of outstanding IOs (read/write requests) waiting to access the disk. If this metrics is frequently above 2, then you should expect sooner or later to face performance issues.
Using the above two graphs it is easy to identify if you are under-provisioned or over-provisioned in IOPS.
If your DiskQueueDepth is consistsently between 0 and 0.5 you are over provisioned.
If your DiskQueueDepth is consistsently above 2 then you are under provisioned.
Finding reason behind high write IOPS on MySQL (RDS) server ?
There are several ways to profile your queries, but as you are using RDS with MySQL , I would recommend you to use PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA to do it easily, as you won't need external software (some of which is not fully RDS-compatible).
You can refer to this video with an introduction to query profiling, with examples like IOPS and temporary table creation monitoring by query pattern, user and table. For a more specific guide (specially for configuration of metrics), you can have a look at the official manual and the sys schema documentation.
If you need to have quick look what is going you can have quick look at the SHOW GLOBAL STATUS like 'com\_%'; and SHOW GLOBAL STATUS like 'Hand%'; at time interval to see if you have an increase on the number of SQL queries per unit of time or on the number of engine row operations per unit of time.
To Conclude, an increase on Write IOPS normally may mean extra SQL load (obviously), but also many other things, such as,too many temporary tables or worse query plans being executed due to a change on the query optimiser plan or on your data cardinality/size. It is critical to identify the underlying cause first before taking any action.
Hope this Helps you !

What are hidden costs or "NOT obvious" costs on AWS

AWS says that everything is "pay as you use". But are there any hidden costs or "NOT obvious" costs on AWS ?
Costs which generally are ignored by people and can give shock:
It is recommended that we deploy our application in Multi AZ for High availability. We assume that data transfer between these servers will be free as this is like intranet; but that is not true. There are charges ( around 10% of internet bandwidth charges ) for data transfer across AZ in same region.
Data transfer within AWS and across AWS regions is also charged.
On AWS Aurora; by default provisioned IOPS are enabled which leads to a huge bill.
If Versioning is enabled on S3; then u need to pay for all versions of every object.
These are not hidden charges but can give you a shock:
Even on other RDS; if u use provisioned IOPS it leads to a huge bill depending on usage.
I think one of the most confusing parts of AWS is the 'EC2-Other' cost category. Most of these costs are based on utilization and can get out of control quickly. I did a write up on how to break down EC2-Other here: EC2-Other Cost Breakdown

Understanding IOPS and IOPS Burst

Ok so I am going through A Cloud Guru's course for the solutions architect associate and I am having trouble understanding what IOP burst are. Here are the notes from the course:
EBS Volume Types
General Purpose SSD (GP2)
General purpose, balances both price and performance.
Ratio of 3 IOPS per GB with up to 10,000 IOPS and the ability to burst up
to 3000 IOPS for extended periods of time for volumes under 1Gib.
After doing some research I understand IOPS to mean input/output operations. Meaning read and write to disk I assume. What I don't understand about this is, what does it mean to have 3IOPS per Gig. Does that mean for every gig of space on the drive you can read/write 3 times to the disk? That doesn't seem right. The other part I don't understand is what does "the ability to burst" mean? My guess is that means how much can be read/written at once over the course of the read/write operation but I'm just guessing.
Actually, IOPS means Input/Output PER SECOND. When you choose your EBS Type it has a baseline IOPS value, meaning that the quantity of operations per second is limited by the volume architecture.
With 3000 IOPS/Gib you have 3000 operations of input/output per second, with the capacity to transfer 1Gib. There are some techinal details here that I'm no the best one to tell you about block sizes and all. But this is a summary.
One thing you must understand is that the IOPS is not just a techical thing but also a comercial thing for Amazon. They sell the EBS with a limited IOPS (baseline), but if you need more IOPS you can pay an extra and create volumes with Provisioned IOPS (that can fo up to 20000).
About the burst, what I tell here is not exactly how it works, but can help you understand a little more that you undersand now. Some volumes can upgrade your IOPS for a brief periodo of time in case is needed without extra costs. This is a temporary burst, an normally with works for just a few minutes. It means that if receive a request for data that extends your defined IOPS, the service will provide with more of your defined for a brief period, to keep your service quality consistent. But if you need it for a long period will need to pay for it.
I think that this burst is based on some type of credits, like if you don't use your availabe IOPS for a time it generate some credits to be used in burst. But this last information must be confirmed with more experienced people.

How does Amazon RDS calculate I/O rate?

I browsed the Amazon RDS pricing site today and now do want to know how they actually calculate the I/O rate? What does "$0.10 per 1 million requests" really mean?
Can anyone give some simple examples how many I/Os a simple query from EC2 to a MySQL on RDS produces?
In general it is a price for EBS storage service. Amazon claims something like this for EBS (section Projecting Costs):
As an example, a medium sized website database might be 100 GB in size
and expect to average 100 I/Os per second over the course of a month.
This would translate to $10 per month in storage costs (100 GB x
$0.10/month), and approximately $26 per month in request costs (~2.6
million seconds/month x 100 I/O per second * $0.10 per million I/O).
If you have a running application on Linux, here is an article how to measure cost for EBS: