Analyze AWS service total bill
For this lab, we are provided a scenario of AWS services below. The aim is to try count the total monthly costs of this used services with AWS simple monthly calculator.
In general, these are the results when we put all of the information above to the simple monthly calculator.
The number are quite staggering especially with how Amazon Route 53 dominating and rocketing most part of the bill. But we will cover the costs a bit more one by one.
Amazon EC2 service provides a virtual cloud environment to deploy virtual machines which will use compute resources that are counted in the bill. The higher the specification of the machine, the greater the costs which are counted hourly.
Amazon S3 service provides such a small amount of bills as it does not take up much storage nor any data transfer throughout the storage.
Amazon RDS service pricing depends on what database engine you use and how powerful the instance is.
Amazon Elastic Load Balancing is a very useful and power service where it can provide a high availability and scalability as well for your AWS services may it be applications or networks. The estimation of pricing is based upon the load balancer availability and number of connections made.
Amazon Route 53 in this case takes up a huge amount in the bill. But basically this service provides a high available and scalable cloud DNS web service. The pricing is based upon the number of hosted zones and how many queries it will take up. The aspect that rocketed the bill was the health checks which happens both within and outside AWS services. AWS has also stated in their pricing policy of Amazon Route 53 health checks, that they recommend to contact them if there will be more than 200 health check per month.
Analysis of Parameters
Amazon EC2 services measure it’s price from it’s usage. The higher utilization of the service would result a higher bill. From a quick analysis, 100% utilzation per month has the same value as 24 hourse of usage per day. This is the default setting for the usage parameter. This is quite obvious as this service will use AWS compute resources to run. Also by changing the billing option from no contract to 1 year no upfront costs reduces the price significantly.
Amazon S3 mostly measures its pricing through its storage size and its requests which includes POST, COPY, PUT, LIST, GET AND SELECT. Information about the size would be quite self explanatory that it should be a parameter to be provided for the service. However, these requests are required to estimate the upload and download requests. POST, COPY and PUT would basically categorized in uploading while GET and SELECT would be in downloading request. Though these requests does not have significant impact in pricing at it would be really small amount of bill.
Amazon Elastic Load Balancing parameters mostly covers on how many load balancers across availability zones and the connection along with data that are estimated to go through each load balancer. The more load balancer used and the higher connections that are used will consume more compute resources that counts for the AWS billing.
Amazon Route 53 is a highly scalable DNS service that works on a global level. There are 2 aspects that are counted for the billing which are the number of domains and how much queries the service are answering. Hosted zones basically are the number of domains that we use as our resource while queries to Amazon Route 53 would be take up some compute resources to process. In addition to those, this service provides health checks to AWS endpoints as well as non-AWS endpoints which require the frequency per month that would be billed. Elastic network interfaces (ENI) would also need to be specified as those are needed for DNS resolve processes. The ENI works on an hourly basis.
Amazon RDS provides instances for relational database. Depending on its class, each instance is priced on an hourly basis from the time the instance is launched until when it stopped. The capacity of storage that it would use are counted as well to the bill with a monthly pricing per GB provisioned. Number of data transfer that goes through the database are also measured but it is a tiny number.
Amazon Support is quite self-explanatory as how AWS would provide help and support to their clients with diverent level of importance and urgency. The higher it goes, the faster it gets to receive a support from the team.
Critical Thinking
This simple monthly calculator provides a reliable estimation of how much bill we should pay in a cloud setup case using AWS services. There various parameters which could be taken in to account as all of them takes up resources either they are compute, storage or networking. Though to even have a good estimation of the costs, you have to provide a detailed estimation of how much processes, connections, storage and capacity that would go through the services. However, you have to be aware that most of these resources are priced on an hourly basis which gives a great advantage as it is a pay what you use scheme when the service is not utilized 100% all the time.
From this lab, we also learn that having to pick a contract even though it is a no upfront payment could actually give it a huge decrease in the bill. And to have to good estimation of the bill it self, a detailed estimation on the processes and specifications of the services should be provided as well.
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