Amazon Infrastructure Services: Build Your Budget for the Cloud
Tags: aws
Published: 2019-07-31 20:43:15

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<figcaption>Image source: [ctrl.blog](https://www.ctrl.blog/media/hero/particle-network.jpeg)<figcaption>

Amazon Web Services is one of the most established cloud providers around. AWS offers a variety of services that leverage its extensive network of virtualized servers. This brief guide covers the pricing options for the various AWS architectures available.
### CloudFront Pricing
* **For regional data transfer out to Internet**—starting at $0.085 per GB for the first 10 TB/month, down to $0.02 per GB for over 5 PB / month
* **For regional data transfer out to origin**—$0.02 per GB flat
* **For HTTP requests**—$0.0075 per 10,000 requests
### CloudWatch Pricing
* **For Amazon CloudWatch Dashboards**, per dashboard per month—$3.00
* **For detailed monitoring of Amazon EC2 instances**, per instance per month—starting at $2.10, down to $0.14 at 1-minute frequency
* **For custom metrics**, per metric per month—$0.30 for first 10,000 metrics, down to $0.02 for over 1,000,000 metrics
* **For alarms**, per alarm per month—$0.10, $0.20 extra for high-resolution alarms
* **For API Requests**—$0.01 per 1,000 metrics requested or 1,000 API requests
* **For Amazon CloudWatch Logs**—$0.50 per GB ingested, $0.03 per GB archived per month
* **For Vended Logs**, per GB—starting from $0.50 for the first 10TB of vended log data ingested, down to $0.05 for over 50TB
* **For events**, per million custom events generated—$1.00
### Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) Pricing
* **For app load balancer**—$0.0225 per Application Load Balancer-hour (or partial hour), $0.008 per LCU-hour (or partial hour)
* **For network load balancer**—$0.0225 per Network Load Balancer-hour (or partial hour)
$0.006 per LCU-hour (or partial hour)
* **For classic load balancer**—$0.0225 per Network Load Balancer-hour (or partial hour)
$0.006 per LCU-hour (or partial hour)
### Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) Pricing
Amazon’s Elastic Container Service can be run via Amazon EC2 or Amazon Fargate. For EC2 tasks, you can use either bind mount host volumes or Docker-managed volumes, which integrate well with external [AWS storage systems like EBS](https://cloud.netapp.com/blog/ebs-volumes-5-lesser-known-functions). I’ll use Fargate deployment as an example of ECS pricing. 

AWS Fargate pricing is calculated based on the vCPU and memory resources, from the time you start to download your container image (docker pull) until your collection of containers (called a Task) terminates, with a minimum charge of 1 minute.


Pricing is based on requested vCPU and memory resources for the Task, both calculated independently and billed by the second:
* **For vCPU**, per hour—$0.0506
* **For GB of memory**, per hour—$0.0127 per hour
### Amazon Lambda Pricing
Amazon’s serverless computing service counts a request each time it starts executing in response to an event notification or invoke call. You are charged for the total number of requests across all [Lambda functions](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/lambda-introduction-function.html).  

Duration is calculated from the time your code begins executing until it returns or otherwise terminates. The price depends on the amount of memory you allocate to  your function:
* **For Requests**—first 1 million requests free, thereafter $0.20 per 1 million requests
* **Duration**—400,000 GB-seconds per month free, thereafter $0.00001667 per GB-second

## Conclusion
In this post I covered the pricing scheme of Amazon’s infrastructure services:
* Amazon CloudFront
* Amazon CloudWatch
* Amazon ELB
* Amazon ECS
* Amazon Lambda

This should help you choose the appropriate architecture for your needs and budget. However, the figures presented here are an estimate, and may differ based on your location, or change with time. To fully understand the long-term costs of using AWS infrastructure, you’ll have to trial it yourself.