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In part one I described the AWS EBS snapshot mechanism. In this part I will drill deeper on how to calculate the EBS snapshot cost. I  will show how to be able to do a rough estimation or even to perform an accurate cost analysis using monitoring tools.

Rough estimation

In order to estimate how large your EBS snapshots will be, you need to know how much your volumes are changing. One way would be to guesstimate,we can use a simple thumb rule that is often used in- backup planning: A typical data volume of a production server changes about 3% a day. Let’s try and calculate the cost. Assuming a 1TB EBS volume, that is 70% full at first. We take snapshots and keep them for 30 days. So, the first full will be taking 700GB (70% of 1TB). For the incremental snapshots we can multiply 30 (days) by 30GB (3% of 1TB) and we reach 900GB. Add them together and we reach about 1.6TB of total snapshot storage. AWS compresses the snapshots when they are stored in S3.

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Amazon CloudWatch is used to monitor several AWS products. Cloudwatch provides various metrics to monitor the user’s instance, the resources as well as the AWS billing. Cloudwatch can send a notification about a particular event. The user can create alerts to send the notifications. CloudWatch monitors the CPU usage and sends a notification if the usage exceeds the specified threshold. AWS CloudWatch also offers a unique feature to stop or terminate an instance when the CloudWatch alarm is triggered.

The present guide demonstrates how to stop an instance if the EC2 instance is not in use. The alarm will be configured to stop the instance when the CPU usage is less than 5% for more than 2 hours. The below mentioned steps are only for an EBS backed instance. For an instance store backed AMI instance, the user can configure the terminate action only.

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Leaving an instance running when it isn’t needed isn’t especially cost effective. But is there a better solution when you need to run short jobs on a recurring schedule? A cloud scheduler allows you “talk” to your cloud and pre-define when instances will start-up and be shut down, from development through to production. Essentially, it enables you to pay only for the time you need.

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Amazon AWS cloud has three types of instance purchasing options:

1. On-demand: the “ordinary” type of EC2 instance - Learn how to launch an on-demand instance.
2. Reserved Instance : Paying a one-time upfront fee and save in hourly instance running costs.
3. Spot instance:  A user can bid for the unused Amazon EC2 compute capacity and get the instance.

A spot instance helps to reduce the cost of the instance.Amazon EC2 has huge idle computing capacity and AWS allows using this idle computing power to launch an instance at a lesser price than an on-demand instance. The present guide demonstrates how to create a spot instance using the AWS supplied Linux AMI.

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The following presentation brought to you by an Accenture technology architecture consultant. The slides describes the deployment of routeyou.com, a high traffic site (avg 25K Visits per day). The presentation contains s short comparison between AWS cloud and Rackspace cloud with regards to storage and servers.

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“Hitting your cloud sweet spot” was the title of Newvem’s breakout session at re:Invent 2021 . I had the privilege to moderate a panel of cloud experts, who joined us to share their cloud operations status, challenges and gaps. Our panelists members were Ed Laczynski, VP Cloud Strategy & Architecture, Datapipe; Shane Myers, Operations at SmugMug; Andrew Kenny, VP Platform Engineering at Acquia; Eric Hammond, from alestic.com and Chemi Katz, VP Technical Operations at DoubleVerify.

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