AWS Pricing Why is it so confusing? James Singleton 

EC2 Pricing • Instance Size • OS • Regions • Instances – On Demand – Reserved • Light • Medium • Heavy – Spot https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ 

Operating System • Linux vs. Windows • Linux is cheaper – Unless it’s enterprise (Red Hat / SUSE) • SQL costs more – Use RDS instead – EBS is slow anyway – Or don’t use MS SQL 

Regions • EU – Dublin (slightly more expensive) • US – Virginia (slightly cheaper) – Oregon (slightly cheaper) – California (slightly more expensive) • Asia Pacific • South America 

Aside: Availability Zones (AZs) • Not to be confused with regions • AZ = data centre • Multiple AZs in each region – E.g. 3 data centres in Dublin • Use multiple for resilience – E.g. eu-west-1a / eu-west-1b / eu-west-1c – NB: zones are not the same between customers • I.e. our 1a is not someone else’s 1a 

Instances • On-Demand Instances – The default – Most expensive option • Especially if dedicated as well (not sharing a host) – Maximum flexibility • Spot Instances – Other peoples’ unused reserved instances – Open market and the price changes – NOT the same as… • Reserved Instances… https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/ 

Reserved Instances • 3 types of reserved (i.e. 5 types total) • Upfront cost & lower hourly rates • Light Utilization – On some of the time • Medium Utilization – On most of the time • Heavy Utilization – On all of the time – This is what you want for an always on server 

How Much Will We Be Charged? • It Depends • Cost includes other things… – S3 (web storage) – EBS (instance disks) – ELBs (load balancers) – Data Transfer (Internet and other AZs) • Use the pricing calculator • Consider another host that has flat rates 

Questions? 

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