Amazon offers a range of cloud storage models, including object storage, block storage, database and data warehouse options. You can also opt for a database
Amazon S3 Pricing
The most basic (and popular) option is Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), which is an object store that integrates with many open source and third-party tools and services. Amazon S3 has unlimited capacity allowing organizations to ingest huge amounts of structured and unstructured data, and work with it on or off AWS.
There are three storage options on S3 - regular S3, S3 Infrequent Access (IA) and Glacier. Comparing the cost of S3 vs. S3 IA and Glacier - looking at cost of upload requests and storage combined - IA provides a cost saving of around 30% while Glacier saves 70%.
Storage pricing:
- For S3 Standard Storage - first 50 TB / month at $0.023 per GB, next 450 TB / month at $0.022 per GB, over 500 TB / month at $0.021 per GB
- For S3 Standard-Infrequent Access Storage - $0.0125 per GB
- For S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA) Storage - $0.01 per GB
- For Amazon Glacier Storage - $0.004 per GB
Request pricing:
- For data returned by S3 SELECT - $0.0007 per GB
- For data scanned by S3 SELECT - $0.002 per GB
- For PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests - $0.005 per 1,000 requests
- For GET, SELECT and all other requests - $0.0004 per 1,000 requests
Data transfer pricing:
- For data transfer IN to Amazon S3 from Internet - $0
- For Data Transfer OUT from Amazon S3 to Internet - first 1 GB / Month at $0.00 per GB, next 9.999 TB / Month $0.09 per GB, down to $0.05 per GB for 150+ TB / Month
- Data Transfer OUT from Amazon S3 to US East (N. Virginia) - $0.01 per GB
Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) Pricing
EBS is a storage component that can be provisioned as part of any Amazon EC2 instance. It may be useful to compare it to Amazon EFS to understand the relative feature set and tradeoffs. EBS provides persistent block-level storage. Amazon offers different pricing for four types of EBS storage volumes:
- For Amazon EBS General Purpose SSD (gp2) volumes - $0.10 per GB-month of provisioned storage
- For Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) volumes - $0.125 per GB-month of provisioned storage
- For Amazon EBS Cold HDD (sc1) volumes - $0.045 per GB-month of provisioned storage
- For Amazon EBS Snapshots to Amazon S3 - $0.05 per GB-month of data stored
Amazon Database Services
Amazon RDS Pricing
Amazon Relational Database Service sets up a managed database server, running either Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle or SQL Server.
I’ll use Amazon RDS for MySQL as an example (pricing for other database services varies) - with on-demand pricing for a single-AZ deployment (multi-AZ costs extra). You can get discounted rates for spot instances or reserved instances, like in EC2.
- For Standard Instances - Lowest Spec - db.m4.large - $0.175 per hour
- For Standard Instances - Highest Spec - db.m4.16xlarge - $3.502 per hour
- For Memory Optimized - Lowest Spec - db.r3.large - $0.24 per hour
- For Memory Optimized Instances - Highest Spec - db.r4.16xlarge - $7.68 per hour
DynamoDB Pricing
- For provisioned throughput (write) - one write capacity unit (WCU) provides up to one write per second, enough for 2.5 million writes per month - starting from $0.47 per WCU
- For provisioned throughput (read) - one read capacity unit (RCU) provides up to two reads per second, enough for 5.2 million reads per month - starting from $0.09 per RCU
- For Indexed Data Storage - DynamoDB charges an hourly rate per GB of disk space that your table consumes - starting from $0.25 per GB
Amazon Redshift Pricing
Amazon Redshift is a highly scalable data warehouse that offers only four instance types. For less than 500 GB of data, the Dense Compute Redshift instance will be sufficient, but to control Redshift costs over 500 GB, consider a more expensive Dense Storage instance.
- For Dense Compute - Lower Spec - dc2.large - $0.25 per hour
- For Dense Compute - Higher Spec - dc2.8xlarge - $4.8 per hour
- For Dense Storage - Lower Spec - ds2.xlarge - $0.85 per hour
- For Dense Storage - Higher Spec - ds2.8xlarge - $6.8 per hour
Conclusion
In this post I laid out the pricing schemes for several popular Amazon storage and database services:
- Amazon S3
- Amazon EBS
- Amazon RDS
- Amazon Redshift
- Amazon DynamoDB
Don’t stop here. Now you know what they cost, go and do your research into what these storage services can do for you. Once you understand which storage model suits your needs, you can plan your cloud storage strategy with a clear notion of the costs and benefits of your decisions. With Amazon’s expansive range of options, it’s up to you to find the most cost-efficient way to store and use your data on the cloud.