•
Operating Systems and Software Packages - Operating System prices are included in the instance prices.
To view a list of currently available operating systems that
you can use with your Amazon EC2 instances and their
prices, go to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon
EC2). There are no additional licensing costs to run the following commercial operating systems: Red Hat Enterprise
Linux, SUSE Enterprise Linux, Windows Server, and Oracle Enterprise Linux. Additionally, AWS has made it easy
for you and has partnered with Microsoft, IBM and several
other vendors so you can run commercial software packages on your Amazon EC2 instances. For example, Microsoft
SQL Server on Windows, IBM Software. For commercial
software packages that AWS does not provide, such as
nonstandard operating systems, Oracle Applications,
Windows Server applications such as Microsoft SharePoint
and Microsoft Exchange, you need to obtain a license from
the vendors. You can also bring your existing license to the
cloud through specific vendor programs such as Microsoft
License Mobility
through Software Assurance
Program.
For more information about
Amazon EC2
pricing, go to
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/.
Amazon
Simple Storage Service
(Amazon S3)
Amazon Simple
Storage Service
(Amazon S3) is
storage for the
Internet. It provides a simple web services interface that
can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at
any time, from anywhere on the web.
When you begin to estimate the cost of Amazon S3, you
need to consider the following:
•
Storage Class -Standard Storage is designed to
provide 99.999999999% durability. Reduced Redundancy
Storage (RRS) is a storage option within Amazon S3 that
you can use to reduce your costs by storing non-critical,
reproducible data at lower levels of redundancy than Amazon S3’s standard storage. Reduced Redundancy Storage
is designed to provide 99.99% durability. Each class has
different rates.
•
Storage -The number and size of objects stored in
your Amazon S3 buckets as well as type of storage.
•
Requests -The number and type of requests. GET
requests incur charges at different rates than other requests, such as PUT and COPY requests.
•
Data Transfer -The amount of data transferred out of
the Amazon S3 region.
36 | www.firstdistribution.co.za
For more information about Amazon S3 pricing, go to http://
aws.amazon.com/pricing/s3/.
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides block level storage volumes 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 three
volume types: General Purpose (SSD), Provisioned IOPS
(SSD), and Magnetic. The three volume types differ in performance characteristics and cost, so you can choose the
right storage performance and price for the needs of
your applications.
•
Volumes – Volume storage for all EBS volume types
is charged by the amount you provision in GB per month,
until you release
the storage.
•
Input Output Operations per Second
(IOPS) - I/O is included
in the price of General
Purpose (SSD) volumes, while for EBS
Magnetic volumes,
I/O is charged by the
number of requests you
make to your volume.
With Provisioned IOPS
(SSD) volumes, you
are also charged by the
amount you provision in
IOPS (multiplied by the
percentage of days you
provision for the month.
•
Snapshot - Amazon EBS provides the
ability to back up snapshots of your data to Amazon S3 for
durable recovery. If you opt for EBS snapshots, the added
cost is per GB-month of data stored.
•
Data Transfer -Take into account the amount of data
transferred out of your application. Inbound data transfer is
free, and outbound data transfer charges are tiered.
For more information about Amazon S3 pricing, go to http://
aws.amazon.com/pricing/s3/.
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)
Amazon Relational Database Service (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.
When you begin to estimate the cost of Amazon RDS, you
need to consider the following: