AWS Economics:
Learn how to efficiently optimize your
resource utilization and control your costs
NYC Cloud Computing Group
Aaron C. Newman
CEO/Founder, CloudCheckr
[email protected]
Agenda:
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Overview of Costs in AWS
Going “Reserved”
Going “Spot”
Optimizing Resources
Economic Denial of Sustainability
Conclusion, Resource, and Questions
Overview of AWS Costs
State of Cloud Computing Cost
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10 years ago
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Co-location/ISPs as an alternative
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The datacenter was a (mostly) fixed cost
High cost for even the most basic data center
You paid for your peak capacity
Still buying your own equipment/building for peak capacity
High margins were the norm
About 2010 Public Cloud Turns the Corner
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Technology matures
Becomes the de facto for getting a startup off the ground
Amazon starts compressing the high margin IT business
Over 20 price reductions in Amazon AWS by 2013
Prices continue to drop. But what is the reality of those 20 price reductions?
EC2 Linux Small Instance (On-Demand Per Hour):
Aug 2006 = $0.10, Nov 2009 = $0.085, May 2013 = $0.06
Extrapolate that to 2015 = somewhere between $0.035 and $0.05
Cost is a product of usage
• In old data center, cost was fixed
– Once you bought the equipment, little could be done to reduce
your cost. No advantage to ever scale down.
• The public cloud is heavily weighted to variable costs
– If you can use less, you spend less
• Optimizing Resource Utilization in the Cloud matter
– Computational engines – run as close to 100% as possible
– Interactive components – need a cushion for peak usage
• Auto scaling - important tool for optimizing cloud usage
– Scale down as much as scaling up
Cloud Costs
(Bytes of Data Transferred) * Price
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(Size of Compute Resource) *
(Price of Compute Resource) * (Number of Hours)
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(Storage Used) * Price * (Time Stored)
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(Transactions Processed) * Price
Architecting Applications
• In the past, architecture was typically a large, multithreaded executable talking to a single database running
on the biggest boxes you could afford. Sat idle a lot.
• Moving old apps into the cloud
– Can you resize your resources different times of the day?
– Use load balancers or Multi AZ capabilities to resize
• Important to design your apps to scale horizontally
• Design you application into components
– That can be added or removed dynamically
Going “Reserved”
What is Reserved?
• Pay up front, get a lower variable cost
• ROI – as high as 500% over 3 years, 60% savings in cost
• Types of Reserved Resources Available
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EC2 Instance
RDS DB Instance
Elasticache Node
S3 Reserved Storage (for GovCloud)
• Types
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Utilization – light, medium, heavy
Commitments – 1 or 3 year
Calculating ROI on Reserved Instances
Picking Type of Reserved Instances
Warnings using Reserved Instances
• Need to be able to predict what you’ll use
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If you design application to scale horizontally this becomes easier
• Heavy Reserved Instances – even if you don’t use it you’re charge
• Match reserved instances carefully!
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OS Type, Availability Zone, Size (VPC vs. Classic, Tenancy only matter for
guaranteed availability)
AWS tools do not show you if an instance is properly mapped
• Determine your highest ROI – Instances, Database, Nodes?
• Consolidated Billing
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Reserved Pricing is applied across AWS accounts
AWS Tools do not show you how your reserved instances are applied
Going “Spot”
What is Spot Pricing
• Bidding for unused instances
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Supply and demand dictates current price
Place your max bid, your instance shuts down if max bid exceeded by others
• Spot is almost always cheaper
• But you need to consider < 99% availability
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Spot prices spike frequently
• Slightly slower to spin up
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Wait for spot request to be fulfilled before instance can start
• More complex to manage
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Using EBS/Instance store
What Does Spot Pricing Look Like
This morning spot pricing:
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US East, Linux, M1 Small (1 ECU): 0.007 - 0.010
SA, Linux, M1 Small (1 ECU): 0.011
On demand: US East = 0.06, SA = 0.08
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US East, Linux, M1 Extra Large (8 ECU): 0.055 - 0.64
SA, Linux, M1 Extra Large (8 ECU): 0.084
On-demand: US East = 0.48, SA = 0.64
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US East, Linux, M3 Double Extra Large (26 ECU) 0.115
SA, Linux, M3 Double Extra Large (26 ECU) 0.185
On-demand: US East = 1.00, SA = 1.36
Spot Pricing is typically 10-20% of On-Demand
But can easily spike HIGHER than On-Demand
Spot Strategies
• Most people don’t understand spot pricing, afraid to use it
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As more people understand and use it, pricing will be driven up
• Very tempting but dangerous to run exclusively on Spot
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From GigaOm: “A sudden spike in the price of “m2.2xlarge” servers (normally
$.44/hour) drove the price briefly up to $999/hour, causing a site-wise outage.”
If you follow this strategy, use a variety of instance sizes, Availability Zones, and
even regions to minimize the risk
• Hybrid Reserved/Spot strategies
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Run as many spot instances as possible
But maintain a base level of Reserved Instances
Switch to On-Demand if Bid Price Exceeds On-Demand Price
This is a manually intensive strategy
Optimizing Resources
Overview
• Keep track of what you are using
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Find and eliminate idle instances
Find and reduce under-utilized resources
Unused EBS drives, ELB, multiple snapshots of same EBS drive
• Horizontally scale
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Find smallest instance type that can handle your transactions
Find your bottle necks (network, disk I/O, CPU util, memory util)
• Turning off resources when they aren’t used
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Turn off over the weekend, overnight
• Use only what you need
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E.g. don’t check multiple copies of buckets in S3
Optimizing Instance Types
• Picking the optimal Instance Type:
• Comparing ECU (EC2 Compute Units)
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M1 Small (1 ECU) On-Demand in US East = $0.06 ($0.06 per ECU)
M3 Double Extra Large (26 ECU) On-Demand in US East = $1.00 ($0.0385 per
ECU)
• Comparing the cost of Memory
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M1 Small (1.7 GiB memory) On-Demand in US East = $0.06 ($0.035 per GiB)
M3 Double Extra Large (30 GiB memory) On-Demand in US East = $1.00
($0.033 per GiB)
• But you need to compare Resource Type, Pricing Type (ondemand/spot/reserved), Region, AZ, etc… for your circumstance
S3, Glacier, and RRS
• S3 Pricing – about 10 cents per gigabyte (starts at 9.5c in US East)
• Reduced Redundancy Storage
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AWS doesn’t store as many copies of your S3 objects
Typically about 20% cheaper (US East $0.095 reduced to $0.076)
Ideal if you are storing terabytes or petabytes of songs, movies, documents that
can be recovered
• How much of your S3 storage can you convert to RRS?
• Glacier Pricing – about 1 cent per gigabyte
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Pricing difference from S3 decreases as the price goes up
Takes up to 4 hours to retrieve files, and cost to retrieve
S3, Glacier, and RRS
• S3 Pricing – about 10 cents per gigabyte (starts at 9.5c in US East)
• Reduced Redundancy Storage
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AWS doesn’t store as many copies of your S3 objects
Typically about 20% cheaper (US East $0.095 reduced to $0.076)
Ideal if you are storing terabytes or petabytes of songs, movies, documents that
can be recovered
• How much of your S3 storage can you convert to RRS?
• Glacier Pricing – about 1 cent per gigabyte
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Pricing difference from S3 decreases as the price goes up
Takes up to 4 hours to retrieve files, and cost to retrieve
Economic Denial of
Sustainability Attacks
EDoS Attacks
• Variation of Distributed Denial of Service Attack
– Goal is not to overload and crash an application
– Instead to cause the server hosting costs to overwhelm
the victim’s budget
“the infrastructure allows scaling of service
beyond the economic means of the vendor
to pay their cloud-based service bills”
-http://rationalsecurity.typepad.com
Worst Case Scenario – AWS CloudFront
• http://www.reviewmylife.co.uk/blog/2011/05/19/a
mazon-cloudfront-and-s3-maximum-cost/
• Author calculated maximum possible charge
– Used default limit of 1000 requests per second and
1000 megabits per second
– At the end of 30 days a maximum of 324TB of data
could have been downloaded (theoretically)
– $42,000 per month for a single edge location
– CloudFront has 30 edge locations
Stories and Lessons Learned
• Anecdotal user experience
– Personal website hacked by file sharers
– Received bill for $10,000
• Note: AWS only charges for data out
– All data transfer in is at $0.000 per GB
– Mitigates costs – if you don’t respond to requests, doesn’t cost
you anything
• Use pre-paid credit cards or credit card with appropriate
credit limit
– Not sure if this limits your liability legally
Solutions?
• Amazon limits/caps have been “in the works”
since 2006
– Each year Amazon talks about intention of releasing
the feature
• May 2012 – Amazon announces Billing Alerts
– http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whatsnew/2012/05/10/announcing-aws-billing-alerts/
– Helps alert you when this starts happening to you
– Could still be a costly few hours
Misconfigured Security Settings
• Scanning Amazon S3 to identify publicly
accessible buckets
– http://cloudcheckr.com/2012/05/aws-s3-bucketsbucket-finder/
• Open source tool – Bucket Finder
– script launches a dictionary attack on the names of
S3 buckets and interrogates the bucket for a list of
public and private files
– Searching out EDoS
Resources, Conclusion,
and Questions
5 Strategies To Optimize
• Keep a close handle on what you are running in the cloud
• Measure what you are spending
• Calculate Return On Investment
• Minimize what you don’t need
• Protect yourself from EDoS
It’s Not About the Price
• Cloud Computing is not about the cost
– It’s about accelerating business, moving faster
• IaaS is following in SaaS footstep
– SalesForce.com pioneered the movement
– Hard to imagined a third-party controlling your entire customer list (one of your
most valuable assets)
– They proved it was secure, prudent, and effective
• Still see some of the slower moving Corporate types claiming
“production work loads can’t be run on the cloud”
– While their competitors leveraging the cloud eat their lunch
Resources
Further reading:
• “How AWS Pricing Works”
– http://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_Pricing_Overview.pdf
• AWS Service Pricing Overview
– http://aws.amazon.com/pricing/
• CloudCheckr Whitepaper Cost Series
– http://www.cloudcheckr.com/whitepapers
• AWS Simple Monthly Calculator
– http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html
Questions?
Questions on:
• Cloud Computing
• Resource Utilization
• Optimizing Your Costs
• CloudCheckr
Thank You for Attending
Get your FREEMIUM account to
check your public cloud
at www.cloudcheckr.com
Aaron Newman is the Founder
of CloudCheckr (www.cloudcheckr.com)
Please contact me with additional questions at:
[email protected]