AWS Cost Estimates

Operations/Production - AWS Cost Estimates

In making the decision to use AWS for PASS production infrastructure, cost will invariably be a deciding factor. This article describes the various cost factors and cost estimates sampling of running such an architecture as described in PASS Design & AWS Architecture. Costs will of course be variable and dependent on the exact implementation.

AWS Resource Cost Factors

The table below contains the AWS resources used by JHU and the configuration options that will impact the cost for each resource most significantly. The order of the resources is based on percentage of the monthly expense, for instance AWS RDS is the most expensive resource in our implementation. The JHU Configuration column has details for each resource as of September 2024 for what our system currently requires for compute, storage, IO, and monitoring. The AWS Pricing Calculator can be used to estimate cost for a PASS application AWS architecture to your specifications.

AWS Relational Database Service (RDS)

• Cost Factors

  • Database Instance Class

  • Storage Size/IO Bandwidth

  • Snapshot retention

  • Data Transfer

  • Database License

• JHU Configuration

  • AWS RDS PostgreSQL

  • Multi-AZ

  • Instance Class: db.m5.large

  • Storage: SSD (gp3) 500 GiB

  • Snapshot retention: Daily system snapshot 7 days (Default)

• Pricing

AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS) Fargate

• Cost Factors

  • ECS Task vCPU/Memory allocation

  • Ephemeral Storage > 20GB

• JHU Configuration

  • 3 ECS Tasks run for deposit and notification services 24/7

  • Per task 1vCPU/4GBMem

  • 4 ECS tasks run for data loader jobs for 2 hours/day

  • Per task 2vCPU/4GBMem

  • 20GB ephemeral storage for each Task

• Pricing

AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

• Cost Factors

  • EC2 Instance Type

  • Storage Size/IO Bandwidth

  • Data Transfer

• JHU Configuration

  • 1 EC2 for Pass-core/Pass-UI, Instance Type: m5.large, Storage: EBS 40GiB

  • 1 EC2 for jumpbox, Instance Type: t3.micro, Storage: EBS 8GiB

• Pricing

AWS CloudWatch

• Cost Factors

  • Size of Logs

  • Number of Custom Metrics

  • Number of Dashboards

• JHU Configuration

  • 7 alarms

  • 3 custom metrics

  • 1 Dashboard

  • 1 Canary Script

• Pricing

AWS Load Balancer

• Cost Factors

  • Usage rate

  • Data transfer

• JHU Configuration

  • 2 ALBs

  • 3 Listeners and Rules

• Pricing

AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF)

• Cost Factors

  • Number/type of Rules

  • Bot Control

• JHU Configuration

  • 3 Rules

  • 1 Bot Control

• Pricing

AWS Simple Storage Service (S3)

• Cost Factors

  • Storage Type

  • Storage Size

• JHU Configuration

  • ~ 5 Buckets

  • ~ 3 GB Total as of Sept 2024

• Pricing

AWS Cost Metrics Sampling

JHU’s PASS production architecture detailed above results in a fairly-consistent operating cost totaling $700-$800 per month.

PASS Account Spend

• About half of the spend is dedicated to the High Availability (HA) production database.

• Compute resources comprise roughly a quarter of the spend.

• The remainder of the cost is spread across supporting services, such as monitoring logging, and security.

• Storage costs for PASS are currently negligible.

Sample of Cost Metrics: July, 2024

Service	Costs
RDS	$379
ECS	$134
EC2	$76
CloudWatch	$50
EC2-Other	$39
Elastic Load Balancing	$33
WAF	$15
VPC	$14
CloudTrail	$12
Config	$3.82
DevOps Guru	$3.12
S3	$1.54
Lambda	$1.04
SQS	$0.24
SSM	$0.19
ECR	$0.18
Route 53	$0.10
Key Management Service	$0.06
Total costs	$772