The AWS Pricing Calculator is a tool provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that allows users to estimate the cost of using various AWS services. The calculator allows users to select the services they are interested in using, specify the usage and resource requirements for those services, and then receive an estimate of the costs associated with those services.

In this lesson, you are going to create a cost estimate for an AWS EC2 instance. Go ahead and navigate to the URL below:

https://calculator.aws/#/addService/ec2-enhancement

EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) Cost Estimate

Type a description for your estimate and choose your desired region. The details of the instance are as follows:

• Tenancy: Shared Instances
• Operating system: Linux
• Memory: 1 GiB
• vCPUs: 2
• Network Performance: Up to 5 Gigabit

EC2 Tenancy This determines if the VM is run on a dedicated host or a shared host server. I definitely do not need a dedicated physical host for a lab project so I will chose shared

What is Tenancy?

I am choosing a t4g.micro instance to fit these needs which clocks in at around $0.0084 per hour:

Next, we need to choose our payment options. You can save money with the Compute Savings Plans by paying up front and committing to a longer period of time. Since this would be a lab project, we don't know if we want to keep or not, let's just choose On-Demand.

I plan to use this VM on the weekends to learn Linux. I expect 4 hours between Saturday and Sunday max, so I will enter that under the usage input box.

So far my bill is a whopping $0.98 per month, but we still need to calculate EBS (basically the VMs hard disk) and networking costs. Scroll down to the EBS (Elastic Block Store) section.

EBS (Elastic Block Store) Cost Estimate

For EBS, select the following settings:

• IOPS: 1000
• Throughput: 100 MBps
• Storage Amount: 100 GB
• Snapshot Frequency: Weekly
• Amount changed per snapshot: 10GB

See the screenshot below for EBS estimate:

Some of this terminology may be new to you, so I am going to break down some of the lesser-known terms below:

What are IOPS?

IOPS stands for Input/Output Operations Per Second, and it is a measure of the performance of a storage system. In the context of Amazon Web Services (AWS), IOPS is commonly used to measure the performance of Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes.

Amazon EBS is a block-level storage service that is designed to provide persistent storage for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. Amazon EBS volumes can be attached to Amazon EC2 instances and used as the primary storage for the instances. Amazon EBS volumes are designed to offer a high level of performance, with a range of options for IOPS and throughput.

What is EBS Throughput

EBS Throughput is a measure of the amount of data that can be transferred to or from an Amazon EBS volume in a given amount of time. Amazon EBS calculates throughput using the equation: Throughput = Number of IOPS * size per I/O operation.

What are EBS Snapshots?

AWS Snapshots are a feature of Amazon EC2 that allows users to create point-in-time copies of Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) volumes. AWS Snapshots can be used to create backups of Amazon EBS volumes, which can be used to restore the volumes in case of data loss or corruption. Snapshots can also be used to create new Amazon EBS volumes or to migrate data between regions.

Viewing the estimate summary

Click the View Summary button. This will take you to see your monthly and annual costs. In my case with the configuration above, this VM will cost $2.69 per month:

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