By Adrian | February 1, 2019
Last month in AWS saw me rack up a bill of $3.40 and I expect this to be much lower next month now that I have abandoned Lightsail. The cost breakdown was as follows:
As you can see, I did hit a wide range of services for the month and most of the stuff I played with had a free tier limit applied. Its great for spinning up a lab or three and the cost really was minimal.
My top 5 free tier services consumed were as follows
S3 is a service that will add up quickly I feel
The following were the services I actually had to pay for outside of the Free Tier
Lightsail
This is where I was hosting the Wordpress blog before transferring it over to a serverless architecture. My Lightsail bill will be reduced to $0 next month.
| Description | Cost |
|---|---|
| 503 Hours usage @ $0.0047/hr | $2.37 |
| 559Mb of stored snapshots | $0.03 |
| Total Cost | $2.40 |
Route 53
Route53 was my second highest cost for the month. Interesting to note that I wasn’t expecting that number of queries, but I guess everything im doing in AWS will pretty much touch DNS. The cost really is negligible, and I cant really see the query cost exceeding $0.05/month any time soon.
| Description | Cost |
|---|---|
| 1 Hosted Zone | $0.50 |
| 55k Queries | $0.02 |
| Total Cost | $0.52 |
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Whilst there was only 1 line item of charge here, I still clocked up around 20 hours of t2.mirco usage, a few hours of Elastic Load Balancer and a few Gb of Elastic Block Store with the various labs and testing I was doing in Jan. The costs here may go up after free tier usage in which ill see if its worthwhile spinning up a new free tier account which will depend on how integrated I’ve become on this account.
| Description | Cost |
|---|---|
| 2 Hours usage of NAT Gateway | $0.09 |
| Total Cost | $0.09 |
Relational Database Services (RDS)
Got stung a few cents here for having a multi AZ deployment for MySQL and the associated storage for a lab I was working on. I also ran up a Dev/Test MySQL instance for 109 hours under the free tier. Luckily I was under the free tier as I had actually forgot to stop the DB instance! This would have cost me $3.70 otherwise. In the context of how much AWS is costing me at the moment that’s a budget blowout!
| Description | Cost |
|---|---|
| 1 Hour Use of db.t2.mirco Multi-AZ instance | $0.03 |
| Storage costs | $0.01 |
| Total Cost | $0.04 |
Simple Storage Services (S3)
S3 usage went beyond the free tier which I was anticipating now that I’m using S3 instead of Lightsail for this blog. I expect more charges to happen here as S3 really is the place to store all the things in AWS, and I am experimenting more in this space.
| Description | Cost |
|---|---|
| approx 10K PUT,COPY,POST,LIST requests | $0.03 |
| approx 10K GET requests | $0.00 |
| Less than 1GB-Mo Stored | $0.00 |
| Total Cost | $0.03 |
Kinesis
My Kinesis usage this month came from a lab on the A Cloud Guru platform titled “Does Twitter hate cats”. I went in expecting a cost for this so ensured I got my learnings from the lab before decommissioning it. The lab uses the twitter API to scan for tweets about cats and then runs them through a sentiment analysis via Comprehend. It was a fun lab to do, but I imagine if you were doing this full time that the costs for this would add up very quickly. The more data you pump in the more shards you require and the more cost you pay.
| Description | Cost |
|---|---|
| 1 Shard Hour | $0.02 |
| PutRequest | $0.00 |
| Total Cost | $0.02 |
Overall I’m pretty happy with the way I’ve experimenting on AWS, taking on labs and small pre-defined projects using a wide variety of services from Image Recognition, Voice Synthesis, Sentiment analysis, Video transcoding to processing streaming data. I have a few things I would like to be trying out for some personal projects but need to skill up my node.js skills first.
GRAND TOTAL: $3.40. Which works out to be $4.72 AUD. Less than the price of a good Melbourne coffee. For February, with the changes I have made, I reckon I can get the bill to around $1 for the month.