The document discusses how the AWS Pricing Calculator works. It is a free, web-based tool that allows users to estimate AWS costs for different use cases and services. It works by making API calls to retrieve pricing data stored in S3 and cached in CloudFront. The pricing data is organized into numerous JSON files categorized by region, instance type, operating system, and other attributes. This architecture allows the calculator to handle a high volume of requests in a cost-effective manner without needing to perform complex computations.

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The AWS Pricing Calculator
An ultra-low-cost product. How to save every penny?
@ AWS Community Day 2022
Fabian Lober
Team Lead SA DACH
AllCloud

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Who doesn’t knows it?

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Who hasn’t used it?

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How is your technical level?

5. AWS Pricing Calculator
What is it?
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● Free web-based planning tool
● Create estimates for AWS use cases
● Share and export estimates
● Includes ~150 services but not all
● Successor of the Simple Monthly Calc

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AWS Pricing Calculator
How does it work?*
* maybe

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AWS Pricing Calculator
How does it work?*
* hopefully

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AWS Pricing Calculator

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AWS Pricing Calculator
How does it work?*
* perhaps

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AWS Pricing Calculator
How does it work?*
* fore sure
● Includes all Data
Transfer prices
● One global file
● Includes all EBS prices
● One global file
● Selection of main
categories
● File per Region
● All EC2 Instances with
prices
● File for every
combination of the
main category

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AWS Pricing Calculator
How does it work?*
* possibly
Operating System Tenancy
Pricing Model
Reservation Period
Payment Options
Offering Class
Generation
License Model
Pre-Installed SW
Location
Instance Family vCPU / Memory
On-Demand
Shared
Dedicated
Reserved

12. 3yrs
SQL Ent
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AWS Pricing Calculator
How does it work?*
* for all we know
Operating System Tenancy
Pricing Model
Reservation Period
Payment Options
Offering Class
Generation
License Model
Pre-Installed SW
Location
Instance Family
Reserved
vCPU / Memory
Dedicated
On-Demand
Shared
Convertible
Standard
Linux
Windows
RHEL
SUSE
1yr
SQL Web
SQL Std
NA
NA
No Upfront
…..
BYOL
No License
Partial Upfront
Memory
……
All Upfront
Compute
General Purpose
us-east-1
eu-west-1
eu-central-1
172.534 combinations, only for eu-central-1!

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AWS Pricing Calculator
How does it work?*
* for all we know
c5.xlarge
● Linux
● Tenancy Shared
● On-Demand
141.62$/Month
c5.xlarge
● Linux
● Tenancy Shared
● 1yr Reserved No-Upfront
89.06$/Month
c5.xlarge
● Windows Server 2019
● Tenancy Shared
● 1yr Reserved No-Upfront
223.38$/Month

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AWS Pricing Calculator
How does it work?*
* hopefully
primary-selector-aggregations.json
● Contains all 690 main combinations
● No Instance details included
● Further used to build the subsequent
requests

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AWS Pricing Calculator
How does it work?*
* perhaps
[...]/{Region}/{TermType}/{Tenancy}/{OS}/{PreInstalledSW}/{LicenseModel}/{LeaseContractLength}/{PurchaseOption}/{Off
eringClass}/{CurrentGeneration}/index.json
"selectors" : {
"TermType" : "Reserved" ,
"Tenancy" : "Dedicated" ,
"Operating System" : "Linux",
"Pre Installed S/W" : "NA",
"License Model" : "No License required" ,
"LeaseContractLength" : "3yr",
"PurchaseOption" : "Partial Upfront" ,
"OfferingClass" : "convertible" ,
"Current Generation" : "Yes"
}
[...]/EU (Frankfurt)/Reserved/Dedicated/Linux/NA/No License required/3yr/Partial Upfront/convertible/Yes/index.json
For every combination

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AWS Pricing Calculator
How does it work?*
* maybe
index.json
● Response with Instance details and price
● Available per Region and OS
● Can be used for further processing

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AWS Pricing Calculator

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AWS Pricing Calculator
How does it work?*
* for sure
Calculation Data
● Build together locally and used for display
● Contains groups, services, metadata, prices,
totals, and more
● The only correct & nice JSON

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AWS Pricing Calculator
How does it work?*
* perhaps

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AWS Pricing Calculator
How does it work?
Public and no OAI
Why is this bad?

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How?
● Every connection over CloudFront
● Everything stored in S3
● Offload all compute to the Users
● New files are cheaper than updates
AWS Pricing Calculator
Why does it work like this?*
Why?
● Costs, Costs, Costs and Costs
● Probably millions of requests
* what a stupid question
��

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AWS Pricing Calculator
Why does it work like this?
Assumptions
● 1.000.000 requests per hour
○ 420 Users can call fifty times EC2
● Every API Call goes to Lambda
● 1GB data and 75% cache hits in the DB
● 10% save their calculations
○ Average size 75 kB
2856%

23. AWS Pricing Calculator
Why does it work like this?
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Pricing Calculation

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AWS Pricing Calculator
(Fun) Facts
Naming Mismatches
● 1yr vs. 1 Year
● OnDemand vs. On-Demand vs On Demand
● NA vs. N/A vs. empty Value
● EU (Frankfurt) vs. eu-central-1
● A badly pieced together software
● No standard, every service is different
● If you miss key “version” for c5.* its empty
○ For all others it’s working without

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Can you imagine how many files must be
in this bucket?

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Thank You!
Fabian Lober <fabian.lober@allcloud.io>
Team Lead SA DACH