amazon-web-servicesaws-ebs

AMI EC2 EBS Backup- cost forecasting


Actually I have to take forecast of costing for one my instance, which is having a number of volumes attached... These volumes are different in size and types.

Let's suppose I took the AMI backup and terminated the server.

Now my confusion is how would I calculate the cost. The cost will be calculated based on pricing of Amazon EBS Volumes or Amazon EBS Snapshot. Because the cost difference is just double.

Let me know if you can help me understanding.

pricing of Amazon EBS Volumes or Amazon EBS Snapshot Which I took from AWS Pricing : https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing/


Solution

  • Amazon EBS snapshots are a complex subject due to the way they work.

    There is a detailed explanation in: Amazon EBS snapshots - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

    A quick summary is:

    So, the cost of Amazon EBS snapshots is mostly based on how much the contents of the volume changes, and how many snapshots (effectively, points-in-time) you wish to keep. If you only keep the most recent snapshot, then all data will be available, but the cost will be minimised because it won't keep any data that has been deleted from the volume.

    Bottom line: Snapshots take less space than the data on a volume due to the incremental natures. The more snapshots ("points-in-time"), the more data will be kept and hence the more cost.