How AWS Pricing Works

AWS Whitepaper
 How AWS Pricing Works AWS Whitepaper

How AWS Pricing Works: AWS Whitepaper

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 How AWS Pricing Works AWS Whitepaper

Table of Contents
Abstract and introduction ................................................................................................................... 1
Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 1
Are you Well-Architected? ........................................................................................................... 1
Key principles .................................................................................................................................... 2
Understand the fundamentals of pricing ....................................................................................... 2
Start early with cost optimization ................................................................................................ 2
Maximize the power of flexibility ................................................................................................. 2
Use the right pricing model for the job ......................................................................................... 3
Get started with the AWS Free Tier ...................................................................................................... 4
Free trials .................................................................................................................................. 4
12 Months Free ......................................................................................................................... 4
Always Free ............................................................................................................................... 4
AWS Pricing/TCO Tools ....................................................................................................................... 6
AWS Pricing Calculator ............................................................................................................... 6
Migration Evaluator .................................................................................................................... 6
Pricing details for individual services .................................................................................................... 8
................................................................................................................................................ 8
Amazon EC2 .............................................................................................................................. 8
Pricing models for Amazon EC2 ........................................................................................... 8
Per-second billing .............................................................................................................. 9
Estimating Amazon EC2 costs .............................................................................................. 9
Lambda ................................................................................................................................... 10
Lambda pricing ................................................................................................................ 10
Additional charges ............................................................................................................ 10
Amazon EBS ........................................................................................................................... 11
How Amazon EBS is priced ................................................................................................ 11
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) .............................................................................. 11
Estimating Amazon S3 storage costs .................................................................................. 12
Amazon S3 Glacier ................................................................................................................... 12
Amazon S3 Glacier provides low-cost, long-term storage ....................................................... 12
Data access options .......................................................................................................... 12
Storage and bandwidth include all file overhead .................................................................. 13
Data transfer ................................................................................................................... 13
AWS Outposts .......................................................................................................................... 13
Pricing of Outposts configurations ..................................................................................... 13
AWS Snow Family .................................................................................................................... 14
Snowcone ........................................................................................................................ 14
Snowball ......................................................................................................................... 15
Snowmobile ..................................................................................................................... 15
Amazon RDS ............................................................................................................................ 15
Estimating Amazon RDS costs ............................................................................................ 16
DynamoDB .............................................................................................................................. 16
Amazon DynamoDB pricing at a glance ............................................................................... 17
CloudFront .............................................................................................................................. 19
CloudFront pricing ............................................................................................................ 19
Amazon Kendra ........................................................................................................................ 20
Amazon Kendra pricing ..................................................................................................... 20
Amazon Macie ......................................................................................................................... 21
Macie pricing ................................................................................................................... 21
Amazon Kinesis ........................................................................................................................ 21
Amazon Kinesis Video Streams ........................................................................................... 22
Kinesis Video Streams pricing ............................................................................................ 22
WebRTC pricing ................................................................................................................ 22
AWS IoT Events ........................................................................................................................ 22

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AWS IoT Events pricing ..................................................................................................... 23

AWS Cost Optimization ..................................................................................................................... 24
Choose the right pricing models ................................................................................................ 24
Use RIs to reduce Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, Amazon ElastiCache, and Amazon
OpenSearch Service costs .................................................................................................. 24
Amazon EC2 Cost Savings ................................................................................................. 24
Match capacity with demand ..................................................................................................... 24
Identify Amazon EC2 instances with low-utilization, and reduce cost by stopping or rightsizing. ... 24
Identify Amazon RDS and Amazon Redshift instances with low utilization and reduce cost by
stopping (RDS) and pausing (Redshift). ............................................................................... 24
Analyze DynamoDB usage and reduce cost by leveraging AutoScaling or on-demand. ................ 25
Implement processes to identify resource waste ........................................................................... 25
Identify Amazon EBS volumes with low-utilization and reduce cost by snapshotting, then
deleting them .................................................................................................................. 25
Analyze Amazon S3 usage and reduce cost by leveraging lower cost storage tiers ...................... 25
Review networking and reduce costs by deleting idle load balancers ....................................... 25
AWS Support Plan Pricing ................................................................................................................. 26
Cost calculation examples ................................................................................................................. 27
AWS Cloud cost calculation example ........................................................................................... 27
Architecture ..................................................................................................................... 27
Daily usage profile ........................................................................................................... 28
Amazon EC2 cost breakdown ............................................................................................. 29
Hybrid cloud cost calculation example ........................................................................................ 30
Hybrid architecture description .......................................................................................... 30
Hybrid cloud components selection .................................................................................... 31
Hybrid cloud architecture cost breakdown ........................................................................... 33
Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................... 35
Contributors .................................................................................................................................... 36
Further reading ................................................................................................................................ 37
AWS glossary ................................................................................................................................... 38
Document revisions .......................................................................................................................... 39
Notices ............................................................................................................................................ 40

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 How AWS Pricing Works AWS Whitepaper
Introduction

How AWS Pricing Works

Publication date: February 24, 2023 (Document revisions (p. 39))

Amazon Web Services (AWS) helps you move faster, reduce IT costs, and attain global scale through a
broad set of global compute, storage, database, analytics, application, and deployment services. One of
the main benefits of cloud services is the ability it gives you to optimize costs to match your needs, even
as those needs change over time.

Introduction
AWS has the services to help you build sophisticated applications with increased flexibility, scalability,
and reliability. Whether you're looking for compute power, database storage, content delivery, or other
functionality, with AWS you pay only for the individual services you need, for as long as you use them,
without complex licensing. AWS offers you a variety of pricing models for over 160 cloud services. You
only pay for the services you consume, and once you stop using them, there are no additional costs
or termination fees. This whitepaper provides an overview of how AWS pricing works across some of
the most widely used services. The latest pricing information for each AWS service is available at: AWS
Pricing.

Are you Well-Architected?

The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps you understand the pros and cons of the decisions you make
when building systems in the cloud. The six pillars of the Framework allow you to learn architectural best
practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable systems.
Using the AWS Well-Architected Tool, available at no charge in the AWS Management Console, you can
review your workloads against these best practices by answering a set of questions for each pillar.

For more expert guidance and best practices for your cloud architecture—reference architecture
deployments, diagrams, and whitepapers—refer to the AWS Architecture Center.

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Understand the fundamentals of pricing

Key principles
Although pricing models vary across services, it’s worthwhile to review key principles and best practices
that are broadly applicable.

Understand the fundamentals of pricing

There are three fundamental drivers of cost with AWS: compute, storage, and outbound data transfer.
These characteristics vary somewhat, depending on the AWS product and pricing model you choose.

In most cases, there is no charge for inbound data transfer or for data transfer between other AWS
services within the same Region. There are some exceptions, so be sure to verify data transfer rates
before beginning. Outbound data transfer is aggregated across services and then charged at the
outbound data transfer rate. This charge appears on the monthly statement as AWS Data Transfer Out.
The more data you transfer, the less you pay per GB. For compute resources, you pay by the hour or by
the second from the time you launch a resource until the time you stop or terminate it, unless you have
made a reservation for which the cost is agreed upon beforehand. For data storage and transfer, you
typically pay per GB.

Except as otherwise noted, AWS prices are exclusive of applicable taxes and duties, including value-
added tax (VAT) and sales tax. For customers with a Japanese billing address, use of AWS is subject to
Japanese Consumption Tax. For more information, see Amazon Web Services Consumption Tax FAQ.

Start early with cost optimization

The cloud allows you to trade fixed expenses (such as data centers and physical servers) for variable
expenses, and only pay for IT as you consume it. And because of the economies of scale, the variable
expenses are much lower than what you would pay to do it yourself. Whether you started in the cloud or
you are just starting your migration journey to the cloud, AWS has a set of solutions to help you manage
and optimize your spend. This includes services, tools, and resources to organize and track cost and
usage data, enhance control through consolidated billing and access permission, enable better planning
through budgeting and forecasts, and further lower cost with resources and pricing optimizations. To
learn how you can optimize and save costs today, visit Optimize and Save your IT costs.

Maximize the power of flexibility

AWS services are priced independently and transparently, and available on-demand, so you can choose
and pay for exactly what you need. You may also choose to save money through a reservation model.
By paying for services on an as-needed basis, you can redirect your focus to innovation and invention,
reducing procurement complexity and enabling your business to be fully elastic.

One of the key advantages of cloud-based resources is that you don’t pay for them when they’re not
running. By turning off instances you don’t use, you can reduce costs by 70 percent or more compared
to using them 24/7. This enables you to be cost efficient and, at the same time, have all the power you
need when workloads are active.

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Use the right pricing model for the job

Use the right pricing model for the job

AWS offers several pricing models depending on product. These include:

• On-Demand Instances let you pay for compute or database capacity by the hour or second (minimum
of 60 seconds) depending on which instances you run, with no long-term commitments or upfront
payments.
• The Savings Plans flexible pricing model offers low prices on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon
EC2), Amazon SageMaker, AWS Lambda, and AWS Fargate usage in exchange for a commitment to a
consistent amount of usage (measured in $/hour) for a one or three-year term.
• The Spot Instance Amazon EC2 pricing mechanism lets you request spare computing capacity with no
upfront commitment and at discounted hourly rate (up to 90 percent off the on-demand price).
• Reservations provide you with the ability to receive a greater discount (up to 75 percent) by paying for
capacity ahead of time. For more details, see the AWS Cost Optimization (p. 24) section.

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Free trials

Get started with the AWS Free Tier

The AWS Free Tier enables you to gain free, hands-on experience with more than 60 products on AWS.
AWS Free Tier includes the following free offer types:

• Free trials – These offers are short-term free trials starting from date you activate a particular service.
Once the trial period expires, you simply pay standard, pay-as-you-go service rates.
• 12 Months Free – These tier offers include 12 months of free usage following your initial sign-up date
to AWS. When your 12-month free usage term expires, or if your application use exceeds the tiers, you
simply pay standard, pay-as-you-go service rates.
• Always Free – These free tier offers do not expire and are available to all AWS customers.

This section lists some of the most commonly used AWS Free Tier services. Terms and conditions apply.
For the full list of AWS Free Tier services, see AWS Free Tier.

Free trials
• Amazon SageMaker: 250 hours per month of ml.t3.medium on Studio notebooks OR 250 hours per
month of ml.t2.medium or ml.t3.medium on on-demand notebook instances for two months.
25 hours per month on ml.m5.4xlarge on SageMaker Data Wrangler for two months. 10 million
write units, 10 million read units, and 25 GB storage per month for two months on SageMaker Feature
Store. 50 hours per month of m4.xlarge or m5.xlarge instances on Training for two months. 125
hours of m4.xlarge or m5.xlarge instance per month on Inference for two months.
• Amazon Redshift: 750 hours per month for free (this amounts to enough hours to continuously
run one DC2). Large node with 160GB of compressed SSD storage. You can also build clusters with
multiple nodes to test larger datasets, which will consume your free hours more quickly. Once your
two-month free trial expires or your usage exceeds 750 hours per month, you can shut down your
cluster to avoid any charges, or keep it running at the standard On-Demand Rate.

12 Months Free
• Amazon EC2: 750 hours per month of Linux, RHEL, or SLES t2.micro / t3.micro instance usage or
750 hours per month of Windows t2.micro / t3.micro instance usage dependent on Region.
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3): 5 GB of Amazon S3 standard storage, 20,000 GET
requests, and 2,000 PUT requests.
• Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS): 750 hours of Amazon RDS Single-AZ
db.t2.micro, db.t3.micro, and db.t4g.micro instances usage for running MySQL, PostgreSQL,
MariaDB, or db.t2.micro instance usage running SQL Server (running SQL Server Express Edition);
20 GB of general purpose SSD database storage and 20 GB of storage for database backup and
database snapshots.
• Amazon CloudFront: 50 GB data transfer out and 2,000,000 HTTP and HTTPS requests each month.

Always Free
• Amazon DynamoDB: Up to 200 million requests per month (25 write capacity units (WCUs) and 25
read capacity units (RCUs)); 25 GB of storage.

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Always Free

• Amazon S3 Glacier: Retrieve up to 10 GB of your Amazon S3 Glacier data per month for free (applies
to standard retrievals using the Glacier API only).
• AWS Lambda: 1 million free requests per month; up to 3.2 million seconds of compute time per
month.

The AWS Free Tier is not available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions or the China (Beijing) Region at this
time. The Lambda Free Tier is available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

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AWS Pricing Calculator

AWS Pricing/TCO Tools

To get the most out of your estimates, you should have a good idea of your basic requirements. For
example, if you're going to try Amazon EC2, it might help if you know what kind of operating system
you need, what your memory requirements are, and how much I/O you need. You should also decide
whether you need storage, if you're going to run a database, and how long you intend to use the servers.
You don't need to make these decisions before generating an estimate; you can play around with the
service configuration and parameters to see which options fit your use case and budget best. For more
information about AWS service pricing, see AWS Pricing.

AWS offers free pricing and migration tools for you to use. If the workload details and services to be used
are identified, AWS Pricing Calculator can help with calculating the total cost of ownership. Migration
Evaluator helps with inventorying your existing environment, identifying workload information, and
designing and planning your AWS migration.

AWS Pricing Calculator

AWS Pricing Calculator is a web-based service that you can use to create cost estimates to suit your AWS
use cases. This service is useful both for people who have never used AWS and for those who want to
reorganize or expand their usage.

AWS Pricing Calculator allows you to explore AWS services based on your use cases and create a cost
estimate. You can model your solutions before building them, explore the price points and calculations
behind your estimate, and find the available instance types and contract terms that meet your needs.
This enables you to make informed decisions about using AWS. You can plan your AWS costs and usage
or price out setting up a new set of instances and services.

AWS Pricing Calculator is free for use and provides an estimate of your AWS fees and charges (not
including taxes). AWS Pricing Calculator provides pricing details for your information only. AWS Pricing
Calculator provides a console interface at AWS Pricing Calculator.

Migration Evaluator
Migration Evaluator (formerly TSO Logic) is a complimentary service to create data-driven business cases
for AWS Cloud planning and migration.

Creating business cases on your own can be a time-consuming process and does not always identify the
most cost-effective deployment and purchasing options. Migration Evaluator quickly provides a business
case to make sound AWS planning and migration decisions. With Migration Evaluator, your organization
gets access to AWS expertise, visibility into multiple cost-effective cloud migration scenarios, and insights
on reusing existing software licensing to further reduce costs.

A business case is the first step in the AWS migration journey. Beginning with on-premises inventory
discovery, you can choose to upload exports from third-party tools or install a complimentary agentless
collector to monitor Windows, Linux, and SQL Server footprints. As part of a white-glove experience,
Migration Evaluator includes a team of program managers and solution architects to capture your
migration objective and use analytics to narrow down the subset of migration patterns best suited to
your business needs. The results are captured in a transparent business case which aligns business and
technology stakeholders to provide a prescriptive next step in your migration journey.

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Migration Evaluator

Migration Evaluator service analyzes an enterprise’s compute footprint, including server configuration,
utilization, annual costs to operate, eligibility for bring-your-own-license, and hundreds of other
parameters. It then statistically models utilization patterns, matching each workload with optimized
placements in EC2 and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS). Finally, it outputs a business case with
a comparison of the current-state against multiple future-state configurations showing the flexibility of
AWS.

For more information, see Migration Evaluator.

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Amazon EC2

Pricing details for individual services

Different types of services lend themselves to different pricing models. For example, Amazon EC2 pricing
varies by instance type, whereas the Amazon Aurora database service includes charges for data I/O and
storage. This section provides an overview of pricing concepts and examples for a few AWS services. You
can always find current price information for each AWS service at AWS Pricing.

Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2 is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed
to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers. The simple web service interface of Amazon
EC2 allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction and with complete control of your
computing resources.

Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you
to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change.

Pricing models for Amazon EC2

There are four ways to pay for Amazon EC2 instances: On-Demand Instances, Savings Plans, Spot
Instances, and Reserved Instances (RIs).

On-Demand Instances
With On-Demand Instances, you pay for compute capacity per hour or per second, depending on which
instances you run. No long-term commitments or up-front payments are required. You can increase or
decrease your compute capacity to meet the demands of your application and only pay the specified
hourly rates for the instance you use. On-Demand Instances are recommended for the following use
cases:

• Users who prefer the low cost and flexibility of Amazon EC2 without upfront payment or long-term
commitments.
• Applications with short-term, spiky, or unpredictable workloads that cannot be interrupted.
• Applications being developed or tested on Amazon EC2 for the first time.

Savings Plans
Savings Plans is a flexible pricing model that offers low prices on Amazon EC2, SageMaker, Lambda,
and Fargate usage, in exchange for a commitment to a consistent amount of usage (measured in $/
hour) for a one or three-year term. Savings Plans is a flexible pricing model that provides savings of
up to 72 percent on your AWS compute usage. This pricing model offers lower prices on Amazon EC2
instances usage, regardless of instance family, size, operating system (OS), tenancy, or AWS Region, and
also applies to SageMaker, Fargate, and Lambda usage.

For workloads that have predictable and consistent usage, Savings Plans can provide significant savings
compared to On-Demand pricing. It is recommended for:

• Workloads with consistent and steady-state usage.

• Customers who want to use different instance types and compute solutions across different locations.
• Customers who can make a monetary commitment to use compute services over a one or three-year
term.

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Per-second billing

Spot Instances
Amazon EC2 Spot Instances allow you to request spare Amazon EC2 computing capacity for up to 90
percent off the On-Demand price. Spot Instances are recommended for:

• Applications that have flexible start and end times.

• Applications that are only feasible at very low compute prices.
• Users with fault-tolerant and/or stateless workloads.

Spot Instance prices are set by Amazon EC2 and adjust gradually based on long-term trends in supply
and demand for Spot Instance capacity.

RIs
Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances provide you with a significant discount (up to 72 percent) compared
to On-Demand Instance pricing. In addition, when RIs are assigned to a specific Availability Zone, they
provide a capacity reservation, giving you additional confidence in your ability to launch instances when
you need them.

Per-second billing
Per-second billing saves money and has a minimum of 60 seconds billing. It is particularly effective for
resources that have periods of low and high usage such as development and testing, data processing,
analytics, batch processing, and gaming applications. Learn more about per-second billing.

Estimating Amazon EC2 costs

When you begin to estimate the cost of using Amazon EC2, consider the following:

• Clock hours of server time: Resources incur charges when they are running; for example, from
the time Amazon EC2 instances are launched until they are terminated, or from the time Elastic IP
addresses are allocated until the time they are de-allocated.
• Instance type: Amazon EC2 provides a wide selection of instance types optimized to fit different
use cases. Instance types comprise varying combinations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking
capacity, and give you the flexibility to choose the appropriate mix of resources for your applications.
Each instance type includes at least one instance size, allowing you to scale your resources to the
requirements of your target workload.
• Pricing model: With On-Demand Instances, you pay for compute capacity by the hour or by the
second with no required minimum commitments.
• Number of instances: You can provision multiple instances of your Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS
resources to handle peak loads.
• Load balancing: You can use Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) to distribute traffic among Amazon EC2
Instances. The number of hours ELB runs and the amount of data it processes contribute to the
monthly cost.
• Detailed monitoring: You can use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor your Amazon EC2 instances. By
default, basic monitoring is enabled. For a fixed monthly rate, you can opt for detailed monitoring,
which includes seven pre-selected metrics recorded once a minute. Partial months are charged on an
hourly pro rata basis, at a per instance-hour rate.
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling: Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling automatically adjusts the number of Amazon
EC2 instances in your deployment according to the scaling policies you define. This service is available
at no additional charge beyond CloudWatch fees.
• Elastic IP addresses: You can have one Elastic IP address associated with a running instance at no
charge.

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Lambda

• Licensing: To run operating systems and applications on AWS, you can obtain variety of software
licenses from AWS on a pay-as-you-go basis that are fully compliant and do not require you to manage
complex licensing terms and conditions. However, if you have existing licensing agreements with
software vendors, you can bring your eligible licenses to the cloud to reduce total cost of ownership
(TCO). AWS offers License Manager, which makes it easier to manage your software licenses from
vendors such as Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and IBM across AWS and on-premises environments.

For more information, see Amazon EC2 pricing.

Lambda
AWS Lambda lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You pay only for the compute
time you consume; there is no charge when your code is not running. With Lambda, you can run code for
virtually any type of application or backend service, all with zero administration. Just upload your code
and Lambda takes care of everything required to run and scale your code with high availability.

Lambda pricing
With Lambda, you pay only for what you use. You are charged based on the number of requests for your
functions and the time it takes for your code to execute. Lambda registers a request each time it starts
launching in response to an event notification or invoke call, including test invokes from the console. You
are charged for the total number of requests across all your functions.

Duration is calculated from the time your code begins executing until it returns or otherwise terminates,
rounded up to the nearest 1 millisecond (ms). The price depends on the amount of memory you allocate
to your function.

Lambda participates in Compute Savings Plans, a flexible pricing model that offers low prices on Amazon
EC2, Fargate, and Lambda usage, in exchange for a commitment to a consistent amount of usage
(measured in $/hour) for a one- or three-year term. With Compute Savings Plans, you can save up to
17 percent on Lambda. Savings apply to duration, provisioned concurrency, and duration (provisioned
concurrency).

Request pricing
• Free Tier: 1 million requests per month.
• $0.20 per 1 million requests thereafter, or $0.0000002 per request.

Duration pricing
• 400,000 GB-seconds per month free, up to 3.2 million seconds of compute time.
• $0.00001667 for every GB-second used thereafter.

Additional charges
You may incur additional charges if your Lambda function uses other AWS services or transfers data. For
example, if your Lambda function reads and writes data to or from Amazon S3, you will be billed for the
read/write requests and the data stored in Amazon S3. Data transferred in to and out of your Lambda
functions from outside the Region the function executed in will be charged at the Amazon EC2 data
transfer rates as listed on Amazon EC2 On-Demand Pricing under Data Transfer.

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Amazon EBS

Amazon EBS
Amazon EBS is an easy-to-use, high-performance block storage service designed for use with Amazon
EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes are off-instance storage that persists independently from the life of
an instance. They are analogous to virtual disks in the cloud. Amazon EBS provides two volume types:

• Solid-state drive (SSD)-backed volumes are optimized for transactional workloads involving frequent
read/write operations with small I/O size where the dominant performance attribute is IOPS.
• Hard disk drive (HDD)-backed volumes are optimized for large streaming workloads where
throughput (measured in megabits per second) is a better performance measure than IOPS.

How Amazon EBS is priced

Amazon EBS pricing includes three factors:

• Volumes: Volume storage for all Amazon EBS volume types is charged by the amount of GB you
provision per month, until you release the storage.
• Snapshots: Snapshot storage is based on the amount of space your data consumes in Amazon S3.
Because Amazon EBS does not save empty blocks, it is likely that the snapshot size will be considerably
less than your volume size. Copying Amazon EBS snapshots is charged based on the volume of data
transferred across Regions. For the first snapshot of a volume, Amazon EBS saves a full copy of your
data to Amazon S3. For each incremental snapshot, only the changed part of your Amazon EBS
volume is saved. After the snapshot is copied, standard Amazon EBS snapshot charges apply for
storage in the destination Region.

• Amazon EBS Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR): This is charged in Date Services Unit-Hours (DSUs) for each
Availability Zone in which it is enabled. DSUs are billed per minute with a one-hour minimum. The
price of one FSR DSU-hour is $0.75 per Availability Zone (pricing based on us-east-1 (N.Virginia).
• Amazon EBS direct APIs for Snapshots: Amazon EBS direct APIs for Snapshots provide access
to directly read Amazon EBS snapshot data and identify differences between two snapshots. The
following charges apply for these APIs:
• ListChangedBlocks and ListSnapshotBlocks APIs are charged per request.
• GetSnapshotBlock and PutSnapshotBlock APIs are charged per SnapshotAPIUnit (block size 512
KiB).

• Data transfer: Consider the amount of data transferred out of your application. Inbound data transfer
is free and outbound data transfer charges are tiered. If you use external or cross-region data transfers,
additional EC2 data transfer charges will apply.

For more information, see the Amazon EBS pricing page.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

Amazon S3 is object storage built to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere: websites,
mobile apps, corporate applications, and data from Internet of Things (IoT) sensors or devices. It is
designed to deliver 99.999999999 percent durability, and stores data for millions of applications used
by market leaders in every industry. As with other AWS services, Amazon S3 provides the simplicity and
cost-effectiveness of pay-as-you-go pricing.

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Estimating Amazon S3 storage costs

Estimating Amazon S3 storage costs

With Amazon S3, you pay only for the storage you use, with no minimum fee. Prices are based on the
region of your Amazon S3 bucket. When you begin to estimate the cost of Amazon S3, consider the
following:

• Storage class: Amazon S3 offers a range of storage classes designed for different use cases. These
include S3 Standard for general-purpose storage of frequently accessed data; S3 Intelligent-Tiering
for data with unknown or changing access patterns; S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA);
S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA) for long-lived, but less-frequently accessed data;
Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval (S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval) for long-lived data that is rarely-
accessed and requires milliseconds retrieval; Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval (S3 Glacier Flexible
Retrieval); Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive (S3 Glacier Deep Archive) for long-term archive and digital
preservation. Amazon S3 also offers capabilities to manage your data throughout its lifecycle. Once an
S3 Lifecycle policy is set, your data will automatically transfer to a different storage class without any
changes to your application.

• Storage: Costs vary with number and size of objects stored in your Amazon S3 buckets as well as type
of storage.
• Requests and data retrievals: Requests costs made against S3 buckets and objects are based on
request type and quantity of requests.
• Data transfer: The amount of data transferred out of the Amazon S3 region. Transfers between S3
buckets or from Amazon S3 to any service(s) within the same AWS Region are free.
• Management and replication: You pay for the storage management features (Amazon S3 inventory,
analytics, and object tagging) that are enabled on your account’s buckets.

For more information, see Amazon S3 pricing. You can estimate your monthly bill using the AWS Pricing
Calculator.

Amazon S3 Glacier
Amazon S3 Glacier is a secure, durable, and extremely low-cost cloud storage service for data
archiving and long-term backup. It is designed to deliver 99.999999999 percent durability, with
comprehensive security and compliance capabilities that can help meet even the most stringent
regulatory requirements. Amazon S3 Glacier provides query-in-place functionality, allowing you to run
powerful analytics directly on your archived data at rest.

Amazon S3 Glacier provides low-cost, long-term

storage
Starting at $0.0036 per GB per month, Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval allows you to archive large
amounts of data at a very low cost. You pay only for what you need, with no minimum commitments or
upfront fees. Other factors determining pricing include requests and data transfers out of Amazon S3
Glacier (incoming transfers are free).

Data access options

To keep costs low yet suitable for varying retrieval needs, Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval provides
three options for access to archives that span a few minutes to several hours. Amazon S3 Glacier Instant
Retrieval provides access in milliseconds. For details, see the Amazon S3 Glacier FAQs.

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Storage and bandwidth include all file overhead

Storage and bandwidth include all file overhead

Rate tiers take into account your aggregate usage for Data Transfer Out to the internet across Amazon
EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Amazon RDS, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service
(Amazon SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), DynamoDB, and AWS Storage
Gateway.

Data transfer
Data transfer into Amazon S3 is free. Data transfer out of Amazon S3 is priced by Region. For more
information on AWS Snowball pricing, see the AWS Snowball pricing page.

AWS Outposts
AWS Outposts is a fully-managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools
to any data center, colocation space, or on-premises facility. Outposts is ideal for workloads that require
low latency access to on-premises systems, local data processing, or local data storage.

Outposts are connected to the nearest AWS Region to provide the same management and control plane
services on premises for a truly consistent operational experience across your on-premises and cloud
environments. Your Outposts infrastructure and AWS services are managed, monitored, and updated by
AWS just like in the cloud.

Example AWS Outposts architecture

Pricing of Outposts configurations

Outposts are priced for Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS capacity in the SKU. You can purchase Outposts
servers for a three-year term with partial upfront, all upfront, and no upfront options available. The price
includes delivery, installation, servicing, and removal at the end of the term.

AWS services running locally on Outposts will be charged for usage only. Amazon EC2 capacity and
Amazon EBS storage upgrades are available. Operating system charges are billed based on usage as

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AWS Snow Family

an uplift to cover the license fee and there is no minimum fee required. Same-Region data ingress and
egress charges apply. There are no additional data transfer charges for local network usage.

AWS Outposts ingress/egress charges

For more information, see the AWS Outposts pricing page.

AWS Snow Family

The AWS Snow Family helps customers who need to run operations in austere, non-data center
environments, and in locations which lack consistent network connectivity. The Snow Family (comprised
of AWS Snowcone, Snowball, and AWS Snowmobile) offers a number of physical devices and capacity
profiles, most with built-in computing capabilities. These services help physically transport up to
exabytes of data in to and out of AWS. Snow Family devices are owned and managed by AWS and
integrate with AWS security, monitoring, storage management, and computing capabilities.

Snowcone
Snowcone is the smallest member of the AWS Snow Family of edge computing and data transfer devices.
Snowcone is portable, rugged, and secure. You can use Snowcone to collect, process, and move data to
AWS, either offline by shipping the device, or online with AWS DataSync.

With Snowcone, you pay only for the use of the device and for data transfer out of AWS. Data transferred
offline into AWS with Snowcone does not incur any transfer fees. For online data transfer pricing with
DataSync, please refer to the DataSync pricing page. Standard pricing applies once data is stored in the
AWS Cloud.

For Snowcone or Snowcone SSD, you pay a service fee per job, which includes five days of device use and
a per-day fee for every additional day you use the device before sending it back to AWS. For jobs lasting
longer than 30 days, you can select the monthly rental option and keep the device over the long term.
For high-volume deployments, contact your AWS sales team.

For pricing details, see AWS Snowcone Pricing.

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Snowball

Snowball
Snowball is a data migration and edge computing device that comes in two device options: Compute
Optimized and Storage Optimized.

Snowball Edge Storage Optimized devices provide 40 vCPUs of compute capacity coupled with 80 TB
of usable block or Amazon S3-compatible object storage. It is well suited for local storage and large-
scale data transfer. Snowball Edge Compute Optimized devices provide 52 vCPUs, 42 TB of usable
block or object storage, and an optional GPU for use cases such as advanced machine learning (ML)
and full motion video analysis in disconnected environments. Customers can use these two options for
data collection, ML and processing, and storage in environments with intermittent connectivity (such
as manufacturing, industrial, and transportation) or in extremely remote locations (such as military or
maritime operations) before shipping devices back to AWS. These devices may also be rack mounted and
clustered together to build larger, temporary installations.

Snowball has three pricing elements to consider: usage, device type, and term of use.

First, consider your planned use case. Is it data transfer only, or will you be running compute on the
device? You can use either device for data transfer or computing, but it is more cost-effective to use a
Snowball Edge Storage Optimized for data transfer jobs.

Second, choose your device (either Snowball Edge Storage Optimized or Snowball Edge Compute
Optimized). You can also select the option to run GPU instances on Snowball Edge Compute Optimized
for edge applications.

For on-demand use, you pay a service fee per data transfer job, which includes 10 days of on-site
Snowball Edge device usage. Shipping days, including the day the device is received and the day it is
shipped back to AWS, are not counted toward the 10 days. After the 10 days, you pay a low per-day fee
for each additional day you keep the device.

For one-year or three-year commitments, please contact your sales team; you cannot make this selection
in the AWS Management Console.

Data transferred into AWS does not incur any data transfer fees, and standard pricing applies for data
stored in the AWS Cloud.

For pricing details, see AWS Snowball Pricing.

Snowmobile
Snowmobile moves up to 100 petabytes (PB) of data in a 45-foot long ruggedized shipping container
and is ideal for multi-PB or exabyte (EB)-scale digital media migrations and data center shutdowns. A
Snowmobile arrives at the customer site and appears as a network-attached data store for a more secure,
high-speed data transfer. After data is transferred to Snowmobile, it is driven back to an AWS Region
where the data is loaded into Amazon S3.

Snowmobile pricing is based on the amount of data stored on the truck per month.

Snowmobile can be made available for use with AWS services in select AWS Regions. Please follow up
with AWS Sales to discuss data transport needs for your specific region and schedule an evaluation.

For pricing details, see AWS Snowmobile Pricing.

Amazon RDS
Amazon RDS is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in
the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while managing time-consuming database
administration tasks, so you can focus on your applications and business.

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Estimating Amazon RDS costs

Estimating Amazon RDS costs

The factors that drive the costs of Amazon RDS include:

• Database instance hours: Resources incur charges when they are running; for example, from the time
you launch a database instance until you terminate it.
• Database characteristics: The physical capacity of the database you choose will affect how much you
are charged. Database characteristics vary depending on the database engine, size, and memory class.
• Database purchase type: When you use On-Demand database instances, you pay for compute capacity
for each hour your database instance runs, with no required minimum commitments. With Reserved
database Instances, you can make a low, one-time, up-front payment for each database Instance you
wish to reserve for a one or three-year term.

• Number of database instances: With Amazon RDS, you can provision multiple database instances to
handle peak loads.
• Provisioned database storage: There is no additional charge for backup storage of up to 100 percent
of your provisioned database storage for an active database Instance. After the database Instance is
terminated, backup storage is billed per GB per month.
• Additional storage: The amount of backup storage in addition to the provisioned storage amount is
billed per GB per month.
• Long Term Retention: Long Term Retention is priced per vCPU per month for each database instance
in which it is enabled. The price depends on the Amazon RDS instance type used by your database, and
may vary by region. If Long Term Retention is turned off, performance data older than seven days is
deleted.
• API Requests: The API free tier includes all calls from the Performance Insights dashboard as well as 1
million calls outside of the Performance Insights dashboard. API requests outside of the Performance
Insights free tier are charged at $0.01 per 1,000 requests.
• Deployment type: You can deploy your DB Instance to a single Availability Zone (analogous to a
standalone data center) or multiple Availability Zones (analogous to a secondary data center for
enhanced availability and durability). Storage and I/O charges vary, depending on the number of
Availability Zones you deploy to.
• Data transfer: Inbound data transfer is free, and outbound data transfer costs are tiered based on the
destination.

Depending on your application’s needs, it’s possible to optimize your costs for Amazon RDS database
instances by purchasing reserved Amazon RDS database instances. To purchase RIs, you make a low, one-
time payment for each instance you want to reserve and in turn receive a significant discount on the
hourly usage charge for that instance.

For more information, see Amazon RDS pricing.

DynamoDB
DynamoDB is a fast and flexible NoSQL database service for all applications that need consistent, single-
digit millisecond latency at any scale. It is a fully-managed cloud database and supports both document
and key-value store models. Its flexible data model, reliable performance, and automatic scaling of
throughput capacity make it a great fit for mobile, web, games, advertising technology (ad tech), IoT, and
many other applications.

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Amazon DynamoDB pricing at a glance

Amazon DynamoDB pricing at a glance

DynamoDB charges for reading, writing, and storing data in your DynamoDB tables, along with any
optional features you choose to enable. DynamoDB has two capacity modes and those come with
specific billing options for processing reads and writes on your tables: on-demand capacity mode and
provisioned capacity mode.

DynamoDB read requests can be either strongly consistent, eventually consistent, or transactional.

On-Demand Capacity Mode

With on-demand capacity mode, you pay per request for the data reads and writes your application
performs on your tables. You do not need to specify how much read and write throughput you expect
your application to perform as DynamoDB instantly accommodates your workloads as they ramp up or
down. DynamoDB charges for the core and optional features of DynamoDB.

Table: Amazon DynamoDB on-demand pricing

Core Feature Billing unit Details

Read request unit (RRU) API calls to read data from your table are billed in
RRUs.

A strongly consistent read request of up to 4 KB

requires one RRU.

For items larger than 4 KB, additional RRUs are

required.

For items up to 4 KB, an eventually consistent

read request requires one-half RRU, and a
transactional read request requires two RRUs.

Core Feature Billing unit Details

Write request unit (WRU) Each API call to write data to your table is a WRU.
A standard WRU can write an item up to 1 KB.
Items larger than 1 KB require additional WRUs.

A transactional write requires two WRUs.

Example RRU:
• A strongly consistent read request of an 8 KB item requires two RRUs.
• An eventually consistent read request of an 8 KB item requires one RRU.
• A transactional read request of an 8 KB item requires four RRUs.

Example WRU:
• A write request of a 1 KB item requires one WRU.
• A write request of a 3 KB item requires three WRUs.

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Amazon DynamoDB pricing at a glance

• A transactional write request of a 3 KB item requires six WRUs.

For details on how DynamoDB charges for the core and optional features of DynamoDB, see Pricing for
On-Demand Capacity

Provisioned Capacity Mode

With provisioned capacity mode, you specify the number of data reads and writes per second that you
require for your application. You can use auto scaling to automatically adjust your table’s capacity based
on the specified utilization rate to ensure application performance while reducing costs.

Table: DynamoDB Provisioned Capacity Mode

Core Feature Billing unit Details

Read Capacity unit (RCU) API calls to read data from your table are RCUs.

For items up to 4 KB in size, one RCU can perform

one strongly consistent read request per second.

For items larger than 4 KB, additional RCUs are

required.

For items up to 4 KB, an eventually consistent

read request requires one-half RCU, and a
transactional read request requires two RCUs to
perform one read per second.

Core Feature Billing unit Details

Write Capacity Unit (WCU) Each API call to write data to your table is a write
request.

For items up to 1 KB, one WCU can perform one

standard write request per second.

Items larger than 1 KB require additional WCUs.

Transactional write requests require two WCUs to

perform one write per second for items up to 1
KB.

Data Storage DynamoDB monitors the size of tables

continuously to determine storage charges.

DynamoDB measures the size of your billable

data by adding the raw byte size of the data you
upload plus a per-item storage overhead of 100
bytes to account for indexing.

The first 25 GB stored per month is free.

Example WCU
• A standard write request of a 1 KB item would require one WCU.

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CloudFront

• A standard write request of a 3 KB item would require three WCUs.

• A transactional write request of a 3 KB item would require six WCUs.

Example RCU:
• A strongly consistent read of an 8 KB item would require two RCUs.
• An eventually consistent read of an 8 KB item would require one RCU.
• A transactional read of an 8 KB item would require four RCUs.

For details see Amazon DynamoDB pricing.

Data transfer
There is no additional charge for data transferred between DynamoDB and other AWS services within
the same Region. Data transferred across Regions (for example, between DynamoDB in the US East
(Northern Virginia) Region and Amazon EC2 in the EU (Ireland) Region) will be charged on both sides of
the transfer.

Global tables
Global tables builds on DynamoDB’s global footprint to provide you with a fully-managed, multi-region,
and multi-active database that provides fast local read and write performance for massively scaled,
global applications. The Global tables feature replicates your DynamoDB tables automatically across
your choice of AWS Regions.

DynamoDB charges for global tables usage based on the resources used on each replica table. Write
requests for global tables are measured in replicated WCUs instead of standard WCUs. The number of
replicated WCUs consumed for replication depends on the version of global tables you are using.

Read requests and data storage are billed consistently with the choice of table class, which could be
either Standard table class or Standard-Infrequent Access table class (that is, tables that are not global
tables). If you add a table replica to create or extend a global table in new Regions, DynamoDB charges
for a table restore in the added regions per gigabyte of data restored. Cross-Region replication and
adding replicas to tables that contain data also incur charges for data transfer out.

For more information, see Best practices and requirements for managing global tables.

Learn more about pricing for additional DynamoDB features at the Amazon DynamoDB pricing page.

CloudFront
CloudFront is a global content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos,
applications, and APIs to your viewers with low latency and high transfer speeds.

CloudFront pricing
CloudFront charges are based on the data transfers and requests used to deliver content to your
customers. There are no upfront payments or fixed platform fees, no long-term commitments, no
premiums for dynamic content, and no requirements for professional services to get started. There is
no charge for data transferred from AWS services such as Amazon S3 or ELB. You can get started with
CloudFront for free.

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Amazon Kendra

When you begin to estimate the cost of CloudFront, consider the following:

• Data transfer out (internet/origin): The amount of data transferred out of your CloudFront edge
locations.
• HTTP/HTTPS requests: The number and type of requests (HTTP or HTTPS) made and the geographic
region in which the requests are made.
• Invalidation requests: No additional charge applies for the first 1,000 paths requested for invalidation
each month. Thereafter, a charge of $0.005 per path requested for invalidation applies.
• Field level encryption requests: Field-level encryption is charged based on the number of requests
that need the additional encryption; you pay $0.02 for every 10,000 requests that CloudFront encrypts
using field-level encryption in addition to the standard HTTPS request fee.
• Dedicated IP SSL: $600 per month for each custom SSL certificate associated with one or more
CloudFront distributions using the dedicated IP version of custom SSL certificate support. This
monthly fee is pro-rated by the hour.
• Real-time log requests: Real-time logs are charged based on the number of log lines that are
generated. You pay $0.01 for every 1,000,000 log lines that CloudFront publishes to your log
destination.
• Lambda@Edge: Lambda@Edge counts an invocation each time it starts executing in response
to a CloudFront event globally. Invocation pricing is $0.60 per 1 million invocation ($0.0000006
per invocation). Capacity and duration are calculated together in GB per seconds used. Duration is
calculated from the time your code begins executing until it returns or otherwise terminates. You are
charged $0.00005001 for every GB/second used.

For more information, see Amazon CloudFront pricing.

Amazon Kendra
Amazon Kendra is a highly accurate and easy-to-use enterprise search service that’s powered by ML.
Amazon Kendra enables developers to add search capabilities to their applications so their end users can
discover information stored within the vast amount of content spread across their company.

When you type a question, the service uses ML algorithms to understand the context and return the
most relevant results, whether that be a precise answer or an entire document. For example, you can
ask a question like "How much is the cash reward on the corporate credit card?” and Amazon Kendra will
map to the relevant documents and return a specific answer like “two percent”.

Amazon Kendra pricing

With the Amazon Kendra service, you pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee or usage
requirement. Once you provision Amazon Kendra by creating an index, you are charged for Amazon
Kendra hours from the time an index is created until it is deleted. Partial index instance-hours are billed
in one-second increments.

Amazon Kendra comes in two editions: Enterprise and Developer. Amazon Kendra Enterprise Edition
provides a high-availability service for production workloads. Amazon Kendra Developer Edition provides
developers with a lower-cost option to build a proof-of-concept; this edition is not recommended for
production workloads.

You can get started for free with the Amazon Kendra Developer Edition, which provides free usage of
up to 750 hours for the first 30 days. Connector usage does not qualify for free usage; regular run time
and scanning pricing will apply. If you exceed the free tier usage limits, you will be charged the Amazon
Kendra Developer Edition rates for the additional resources you use. See Amazon Kendra pricing for
pricing details.

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Amazon Macie

Amazon Macie
Macie is a fully-managed data security and data privacy service that uses ML and pattern matching to
cost-efficiently discover and protect your sensitive data in AWS at scale. Macie automatically detects
a large and growing list of sensitive data types, including personally identifiable information (PII)
such as names, addresses, and credit card numbers. It also gives you constant visibility of the data
security and data privacy of your data stored in Amazon S3. Macie is easy to set up with one click in
the AWS Management Console or a single API call. Macie provides multi-account support using AWS
Organizations, so you can enable Macie across all of your accounts with a few clicks.

Macie pricing
With Macie, you are charged based on the number of Amazon S3 buckets evaluated for bucket-level
security and access controls and the quantity of data processed for sensitive data discovery.

When you enable Macie, the service will gather detail on all of your S3 buckets, including bucket names,
size, object count, resource tags, encryption status, access controls, and region placement. Macie will
then automatically and continually evaluate all of your buckets for security and access control, alerting
you to any unencrypted buckets, publicly accessible buckets, or buckets shared with an AWS account
outside of your organization. You are charged based on the total number of buckets in your account after
the 30-day free trial and charges are pro-rated per day.

After enabling the service, you are able to configure and submit buckets for sensitive data discovery. This
is done by selecting the buckets you would like scanned, configuring a one-time or periodic sensitive
data discovery job, and submitting it to Macie. Macie only charges for the bytes processed in supported
object types it inspects. As part of Macie sensitive data discovery jobs, you will also incur the standard
Amazon S3 charges for GET and LIST requests. See Requests and data retrievals pricing on the Amazon
S3 pricing page.

Free tier | Sensitive data discovery

For sensitive data discovery jobs, the first 1 GB processed every month in each account comes at no cost.
For each GB processed beyond the first 1 GB, charges will occur. Please refer to Amazon Macie Pricing for
pricing details.

Note: You are only charged for jobs you configure and submit to the service for sensitive data discovery.

Amazon Kinesis
Kinesis makes it easy to collect, process, and analyze real-time, streaming data so you can get timely
insights and react quickly to new information. Kinesis offers key capabilities to cost-effectively process
streaming data at any scale, along with the flexibility to choose the tools that best suit the requirements
of your application. With Kinesis, you can ingest real-time data such as video, audio, application logs,
website clickstreams, and IoT telemetry data for ML, analytics, and other applications. Kinesis enables
you to process and analyze data as it arrives and respond instantly instead of having to wait until all your
data is collected before the processing can begin.

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is a scalable and durable real-time data streaming service that can
continuously capture gigabytes of data per second from hundreds of thousands of sources. See Amazon
Kinesis Data Streams Pricing for pricing details.

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is the easiest way to capture, transform, and load data streams into AWS
data stores for near real-time analytics with existing business intelligence tools. See Amazon Kinesis Data
Firehose Pricing for pricing details.

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Amazon Kinesis Video Streams

Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink is the easiest way to process data streams in real time with
SQL or Apache Flink without having to learn new programming languages or processing frameworks. See
Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink Pricing for pricing details.

Amazon Kinesis Video Streams

Amazon Kinesis Video Streams makes it easy to securely stream media from connected devices to
AWS for storage, analytics, ML, playback, and other processing. Kinesis Video Streams automatically
provisions and elastically scales all the infrastructure needed to ingest streaming media from millions
of devices. It durably stores, encrypts, and indexes media in your streams, and allows you to access your
media through easy-to-use APIs. Kinesis Video Streams enables you to quickly build computer vision and
ML applications through integration with Amazon Rekognition Video, SageMaker, and libraries for ML
frameworks such as Apache MXNet, TensorFlow, and OpenCV. For live and on-demand playback, Kinesis
Video Streams provides fully-managed capabilities for HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) and Dynamic Adaptive
Streaming over HTTP (DASH). Kinesis Video Streams also supports fully managed ultra-low latency two-
way media streaming with WebRTC.

Kinesis Video Streams is ideal for building media streaming applications for camera-enabled IoT devices
and for building real-time, computer vision-enabled ML applications that are increasingly prevalent
across a wide range of use cases.

Kinesis Video Streams pricing

You pay only for the volume of data you ingest (GB), store (GB/month), and consume (GB) in your video
streams. Kinesis Video Streams will only charge for media data it successfully received, with a minimum
chunk size of 4 KB. For comparison, a 64 Kbps audio sample is 8 KB in size, so the minimum chunk size is
set low enough to accommodate the smallest of audio or video streams.

WebRTC pricing
If you use WebRTC capabilities, you pay for the number of signaling channels that are active in a given
month, the number of signaling messages sent and received, and Traversal Using Relays around NAT
(TURN) streaming minutes used for relaying media. A signaling channel is considered active in a month
if at any time during the month a device or an application connects to it. TURN streaming minutes are
metered in one-minute increments.

You will incur standard AWS data transfer charges when you retrieve data from your video streams to
destinations outside of AWS over the internet.

See Amazon Kinesis Video Streams Pricing for pricing details.

AWS IoT Events

AWS IoT Events helps companies continuously monitor their equipment and fleets of devices for failure
or changes in operation and trigger alerts to respond when events occur. AWS IoT Events recognizes
events across multiple sensors to identify operational issues, such as equipment slowdowns, and
generates alerts such as notifying support teams of an issue. AWS IoT Events offers a managed, complex
event detection service on the AWS Cloud, accessible through the AWS IoT Events console (a browser-
based graphical user interface (GUI) where you can define and manage your event detectors, or directly
ingest APIs). Understanding equipment or a process based on telemetry from a single sensor is often
not possible; a complex event detection service will combine multiple sources of telemetry to gain full
insight into equipment and processes. You define conditional logic and states inside AWS IoT Events to
evaluate incoming telemetry data to detect events in equipment or a process. When AWS IoT Events
detects an event, it can initiate pre-defined actions in another AWS service, such as sending alerts
through Amazon SNS.

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AWS IoT Events pricing

AWS IoT Events pricing

With AWS IoT Events, you pay only for what you use with no minimum fees or mandatory service usage.
When you create an event detector in AWS IoT Events, you apply conditional logic such as if-then-else
statements to understand events, such as when a motor might be stuck. You are only charged for each
message that is evaluated in AWS IoT Events.

See AWS IoT Events pricing for pricing details.

The AWS Free Tier is available to you for 12 months starting on the date you create your AWS account.
When your free usage expires or if your application use exceeds the free usage tiers, you simply pay the
above rates. Your usage is calculated each month across all regions and is automatically applied to your
bill. Note that free usage does not accumulate from one billing period to the next.

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Choose the right pricing models

AWS Cost Optimization

AWS enables you to take control of cost and continuously optimize your spend, while building modern,
scalable applications to meet your needs. AWS's breadth of services and pricing options offer the
flexibility to effectively manage your costs and still keep the performance and capacity you require. AWS
is dedicated to helping customers achieve the highest savings potential. Get started with the steps below
that will have an immediate impact on your bill today.

Choose the right pricing models

Use RIs to reduce Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift,
Amazon ElastiCache, and Amazon OpenSearch
Service costs
For certain services like Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS, you can invest in reserved capacity.

With Reserved Instances, you can save up to 72 percent over the equivalent on-demand capacity. RIs are
available in three options: All up-front (AURI), partial up-front (PURI), and no upfront payments (NURI).
Use the recommendations provided in AWS Cost Explorer RI purchase recommendations, which is based
on your Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, ElastiCache, and OpenSearch Service usage.

Amazon EC2 Cost Savings

Use Amazon Spot Instances to reduce Amazon EC2 costs, use Compute Savings Plans to reduce Amazon
EC2, Fargate, and Lambda costs, and use SageMaker Savings Plans to reduce SageMaker costs.

Match capacity with demand

Identify Amazon EC2 instances with low-utilization,
and reduce cost by stopping or rightsizing.
Use AWS Cost Explorer Resource Optimization to get a report of Amazon EC2 instances that are either
idle or have low utilization. You can reduce costs by either stopping or downsizing these instances.
Use AWS Instance Scheduler to automatically stop instances. Use AWS Operations Conductor to
automatically resize the Amazon EC2 instances (based on the recommendations report from Cost
Explorer).

Identify Amazon RDS and Amazon Redshift instances

with low utilization and reduce cost by stopping
(RDS) and pausing (Redshift).
Use the Trusted Advisor Amazon RDS Idle DB instances check to identify DB instances which have
not had any connection over the last seven days. To reduce costs, stop these DB instances using the

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Analyze DynamoDB usage and reduce cost
by leveraging AutoScaling or on-demand.

automation steps described here: Implementing DB Instance Stop and Start in Amazon RDS. For
Redshift, use the Trusted Advisor Underutilized Redshift clusters check to identify clusters which have
had no connections for the last seven days, and less than 5 percent cluster wide average CPU utilization
for 99 percent of the last seven days. To reduce costs, pause these clusters using the steps in: Lower your
costs with the new pause and resume actions on Amazon Redshift.

Analyze DynamoDB usage and reduce cost by

leveraging AutoScaling or on-demand.
Analyze your DynamoDB usage by monitoring two metrics, ConsumedReadCapacityUnits and
ConsumedWriteCapacityUnits, in CloudWatch. To automatically scale (in and out) your DynamoDB table,
use the AutoScaling feature. Using the steps at Enabling DynamoDB auto scaling on existing tables, you
can enable AutoScaling on your existing tables. Alternately, you can also use the on-demand option. This
option allows you to pay-per-request for read and write requests so that you only pay for what you use,
making it easy to balance costs and performance.

Implement processes to identify resource waste

Identify Amazon EBS volumes with low-utilization
and reduce cost by snapshotting, then deleting them
Amazon EBS volumes that have very low activity (less than one IOPS per day) over a period of seven
days indicate that they are probably not in use. Identify these volumes using the Trusted Advisor
Underutilized Amazon EBS Volumes Check. To reduce costs, first snapshot the volume (in case you need
it later), then delete these volumes. You can automate the creation of snapshots using the Amazon Data
Lifecycle Manager. Follow the steps at Delete an Amazon EBS volume to delete Amazon EBS volumes.

Analyze Amazon S3 usage and reduce cost by

leveraging lower cost storage tiers
Use Amazon S3 analytics to analyze storage access patterns on the object data set for 30 days or longer.
Amazon S3 Analytics makes recommendations for leveraging S3 Infrequently Accessed (S3 IA) to reduce
costs. You can automate moving these objects into a lower cost storage tier using lifecycle policies.
Alternately, you can also use S3 Intelligent-Tiering, which automatically analyzes and moves your objects
to the appropriate storage tier.

Review networking and reduce costs by deleting idle

load balancers
Use the Trusted Advisor Idle Load Balancers check to get a report of load balancers that have a
RequestCount of less than 100 over the past seven days. Then use Step 8: Delete your load balancer
(optional) to delete these load balancers to reduce costs. Additionally, use the steps provided in Using
AWS Cost Explorer to analyze data transfer costs to review your data transfer costs using Cost Explorer.

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AWS Support Plan Pricing

AWS Support provides a mix of tools and technology, people, and programs designed to proactively
help you optimize performance, lower costs, innovate faster, and focus on solving some of the toughest
challenges that hold you back in your cloud journey.

There are four types of support plans available: Developer, Business, Enterprise On-Ramp, and
Enterprise. All paid AWS Support plans are billed monthly with no long-term contracts. AWS Support
fees are calculated on a per-account basis for Business and Developer Support plans. For Enterprise On-
Ramp and Enterprise Support, you are billed based on the aggregate monthly AWS charges for all your
account IDs subscribed to Enterprise On-Ramp or Enterprise Support. For more details, see Compare
AWS Support Plans and AWS Support Plan Pricing.

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AWS Cloud cost calculation example

Cost calculation examples

The following sections use the AWS Pricing Calculator to provide example cost calculations for two use
cases.

Topics
• AWS Cloud cost calculation example (p. 27)
• Hybrid cloud cost calculation example (p. 30)

AWS Cloud cost calculation example

This example is a common use case of a dynamic website hosted on AWS using Amazon EC2, Amazon
EC2 Auto Scaling, and Amazon RDS. The Amazon EC2 instance runs the web and application tiers, and
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling matches the number of instances to the traffic load. Amazon RDS uses one DB
instance for its primary storage, and this DB instance is deployed across multiple Availability Zones.

Architecture
ELB balances traffic to the Amazon EC2 instances in an AWS Auto Scaling group, which adds or subtracts
Amazon EC2 instances to match the load. Deploying Amazon RDS across multiple Availability Zones
enhances data durability and availability. Amazon RDS provisions and maintains a standby in a different
Availability Zone for automatic failover in the event of outages, planned or unplanned. The following
illustration shows the example architecture for a dynamic website using Amazon EC2, Amazon EC2
Auto Scaling, and security groups to enforce least-privilege access to AWS infrastructure and selected
architecture components, and one Amazon RDS database instance across multiple Availability Zones
(Multi-AZ deployment). All these components are deployed into a single region and virtual private cloud
(VPC). The VPC spans two availability zones to support failover scenarios. Route 53 Resolver is used to
manage and route requests for one hosted zone towards the Elastic Load Balancer.

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Daily usage profile

AWS Cloud deployment architecture

Daily usage profile

You can monitor daily usage for your application so that you can better estimate your costs. For instance,
you can look at the daily pattern to figure out how your application handles traffic. For each hour, track
how many hits you get on your website and how many instances are running, and then add up the total
number of hits for that day.

Hourly instance pattern = (hits per hour on website) / (number of instances)

Examine the number of Amazon EC2 instances that run each hour, and then take the average. You can
use the number of hits per day and the average number of instances for your calculations.

Daily pro#le = SUM(Hourly instance pattern) / 24

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Amazon EC2 cost breakdown

Amazon EC2 cost breakdown

The following table shows the characteristics for Amazon EC2 used for this dynamic site in the US East
(Northern Virginia) Region.

Characteristic Estimated Usage Description

Utilization 100% All infrastructure components

run 24 hours per day, seven days
per week

Instance t3a.xlarge 16 GB memory, 4 vCPU

Storage Amazon EBS SSD gp2 One Amazon EBS volume per
instance with 30 GB of storage
per volume

Data backup Daily Amazon EBS snapshots One Amazon EBS volume per
instance with 30 GB of storage
per volume

Data transfer Data in: 1 TB/month 10% incremental change per day

Data out: 1 TB/month

Instance scale 4 On average per day, there are

four instances running

Load Balancing 20 GB/hour ELB is used 24 hours per

day, seven days per week. It
processes a total of 20 GB/hour
(data in and data out)

Database MySQL, db.m5.large instance Multi-AZ deployment with

with 8 GB memory, 2 vCPUs, 100 synchronous standby replica in a
GB storage separate Availability Zone

The total cost for one month is the sum of the cost of the running services and data transfer out, minus
the AWS Free Tier discount. We calculated the total cost using the AWS Pricing Calculator.

Table: Cost breakdown

Service Monthly Annually Configuration

ELB $87.60 $1,051.20 Number of Network

Load Balancers (one),
Processed bytes per
Network Load Balancer
(NLB) for TCP (20 GB
per hour)

Amazon EC2 $439.16 $5,269.92 Operating system

(Linux), quantity
(four), storage for each
Amazon EC2 instance
(General Purpose SSD

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Hybrid cloud cost calculation example

(gp2)), storage amount

(30 GB), instance type
(t3a.xlarge)

Amazon Elastic IP $0 $0 Number of Amazon EC2

address instances (one), Number
of EIPs per instance
(one)

Amazon RDS for MySQL $272.66 $3,271.92 Quantity (one)

db.m5.large, Storage
for each Amazon RDS
instance (General
Purpose SSD (gp2)),
storage amount (100
GB)

Amazon Route 53 $183.00 $2,196.00 Hosted Zones (1),

Number of Elastic
Network Interfaces (2),
Basic Checks Within
AWS (0)

Amazon Virtual Private $92.07 $1,104.84 Data transfer cost,

Cloud (Amazon VPC) inbound (from:
internet) 1 TB per
month, outbound
(to: internet) 1 TB per
month, intra-Region 0
TB per month

Hybrid cloud cost calculation example

This example is a hybrid cloud use case of AWS Outposts rack, deployed on-premises and connected to
AWS Cloud using AWS Direct Connect. Outposts extends the existing VPC from the selected AWS Region
to the customer data center. Selected AWS services required to run on-premises (for example, Amazon
Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)) are available on Outposts inside the Outpost Availability Zone,
deployed inside a separate subnet.

Hybrid architecture description

The following example shows an Outpost deployment with distributed Amazon EKS service extending to
on-premises environments.

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 How AWS Pricing Works AWS Whitepaper
Hybrid cloud components selection

AWS Outpost with Amazon EKS Control Plane and Data Plane Architecture

Architecture
• The Control Plane for Amazon EKS remains in the Region, which means in the case of Amazon EKS,
the Kubernetes Primary node will stay in the Availability Zone deployed to the Region (not on the
Outposts).
• The Amazon EKS worker nodes are deployed on the Outpost, controlled by a Primary node deployed in
the Availability Zone.

Traffic Flow
• The EKS Control Plane Traffic between EKS, AWS metrics, and CloudWatch transits third-party
networks (AWS Direct Connect/AWS Site-to-Site VPN to the AWS Region).
• The Application / Data Traffic is isolated from Control plane and distributed between Outposts and
local network.
• Distribution of Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) (deployed on Outpost) is driven by central Amazon ECR
in Region; however, all images are cached locally on the Outpost.

Load Balancers
• Application Load Balancer is supported on Outpost as the only local ELB available.
• The Network Load Balancer and Classic Load Balancer stay in the Region, but targets deployed at
Outposts are supported (including Application Load Balancer).
• On-premises (inside corporate DC) Load Balancers (for example, F5 BIG IP, NetScaler) can be deployed
and routed via Local Gateway (inside AWS Outpost).

Hybrid cloud components selection

Customers can choose from a range of pre-validated Outposts configurations (Figure: Example Outposts
architecture) offering a mix of Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS capacity designed to meet a variety of

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Hybrid cloud components selection

application needs. AWS can also work with customers to create a customized configuration designed for
their unique application needs.

To identify the correct configuration, make sure to verify the deployment and operational parameters of
the selected physical location for the AWS Outpost rack installation. The following example represents
a set of parameters highlighting facility, networking, and power requirements needed for location
validation (selected parameter: example value):

Purchase Option: All Upfront

Term: 3 Years

Max on premises power capacity: 20kVA

Max weight: 2,500lb

Networking uplink speed: 100Gbps

Number of Racks: 1

Average Power Draw per Rack: 9.34

Constraint (power draw/weight): Power Draw

Total Outpost vCPU: 480

Total Outpost Memory: 2,496 GiB

In addition to minimum parameters, you should make deployment assumptions prior to any order to
minimize the performance and security impact on existing infrastructure (selected question: example
assumption).

Question: What is the speed of the uplink ports from your Outposts Network Devices (OND)? Example
answer: 40 or 100Gbps.

Question: How many uplinks per OND will you use to connect the AWS Outpost to your network?
Example answer: Four uplinks.

Question: How will the Outpost service link (the Outpost control plane) access AWS services? Example
answer: Service link will access AWS over a Direct Connect public VIF.

Question: Is there a firewall between Outposts and the Internet. Example answer: Yes

Considering these assumptions together with selected components will result in an architecture with a
higher granularity of detail and will influence the overall cost of a hybrid cloud deployment (Figure AWS
Outpost with Amazon EKS Control Plane and Data Plane Architecture).

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 How AWS Pricing Works AWS Whitepaper
Hybrid cloud architecture cost breakdown

Hybrid cloud architecture deployment example

Hybrid cloud architecture cost breakdown

Hybrid cloud costs include multiple layers and components deployed across the AWS cloud and on-
premises location. When you use AWS Managed Services on Outposts, you are charged for the services
based only on usage by instance-hour and not for the underlying Amazon EC2 instance and Amazon EBS
storage.

Breakdown of these services is showcased in next sections for a three-year term with partial upfront,
all upfront, and no upfront options (Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS capacity). Price includes delivery,
installation, servicing, and removal at the end of term—there is no additional charge.

Outpost rack charges (customized example)

Amazon EC2 Charges

• c5.24xlarge, 11 TB

• $7,148.67 monthly;
• $123,650.18 up front, $3,434.73 monthly
• $239,761.41 up front

• 1 m5.24xlarge, 11 TB

• $7,359.69 monthly
• $127,167.06 up front, $3,532.42 monthly

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 How AWS Pricing Works AWS Whitepaper
Hybrid cloud architecture cost breakdown

• $246,373.14 up front

• Amazon EBS
• 11 TB EBS tier is priced at $0.30/GB monthly

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 How AWS Pricing Works AWS Whitepaper

Conclusion
Although the number and types of services offered by AWS have increased dramatically, our philosophy
on pricing has not changed. You pay as you go, pay for what you use, pay less as you use more, and
pay even less when you reserve capacity. All of these options empower AWS customers to choose their
preferred pricing model and increase the flexibility of their cost strategy.

Projecting costs for a use case—for example, web application hosting—can be challenging because
a solution typically uses multiple features across multiple AWS products. This means there are more
factors and purchase options to consider.

The best way to estimate costs is to examine the fundamental characteristics for each AWS product,
estimate your usage for each characteristic, and then map that usage to the prices posted on the
website.

You can use the AWS Pricing Calculator to estimate your monthly bill. The calculator provides a per-
service cost breakdown, as well as an aggregate monthly estimate. You can also use the calculator to see
an estimation and breakdown of costs for common solutions.

Remember, you can get started with most AWS services at no cost using the AWS Free Tier.

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 How AWS Pricing Works AWS Whitepaper

Contributors
Contributors to this document include:

• Vladimir Baranek, Principal Partner Solution Architect, Amazon Web Services

• Senthil Arumugam, Senior Partner Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services
• Mihir Desai, Senior Partner Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services
• Nick Worthington, Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services
• Marc Weiss, Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services

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 How AWS Pricing Works AWS Whitepaper

Further reading
For additional information, see:

• AWS Pricing
• AWS Pricing Calculator
• AWS Free Tier
• AWS Cloud Financial Management
• AWS Cost and Usage Reports
• AWS Cloud Economics Center

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 How AWS Pricing Works AWS Whitepaper

AWS glossary
For the latest AWS terminology, see the AWS glossary in the AWS Glossary Reference.

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 How AWS Pricing Works AWS Whitepaper

Document revisions
To be notified about updates to this whitepaper, subscribe to the RSS feed.

Change Description Date

Whitepaper updated (p. 39) Removed Amazon S3 Glacier August 29, 2023
Select pricing.

Whitepaper updated (p. 39) Updated and added service February 24, 2023
pricing details, options,
calculation, and examples.

Minor update (p. 39) Fix non-inclusive language. April 6, 2022

Whitepaper updated (p. 39) Updated and added service October 30, 2020
pricing details, options,
calculation, and examples.

Initial publication (p. 39) Whitepaper first published. June 1, 2018

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Notices
Customers are responsible for making their own independent assessment of the information in this
document. This document: (a) is for informational purposes only, (b) represents current AWS product
offerings and practices, which are subject to change without notice, and (c) does not create any
commitments or assurances from AWS and its affiliates, suppliers or licensors. AWS products or services
are provided “as is” without warranties, representations, or conditions of any kind, whether express or
implied. The responsibilities and liabilities of AWS to its customers are controlled by AWS agreements,
and this document is not part of, nor does it modify, any agreement between AWS and its customers.

© 2023 Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

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