Primitive Wiring Natural Reciprocal Cloud Pricing Cheatsheet
Our brains count on their fingers, not in thousandths of a dollar. Instead of memorising $0.0018/GB, remember "$1 buys you X units": my reciprocal FinOps cheatsheet for key AWS services.
A (standard) human brain was never meant to remember deep decimal numbers, of the order of magnitude that scientists would call“epsilon”.
E.g. (eu-west-3)- AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive pricing: $0.0018 per GB
- Frequent Access Tier: $0.024 per GB
Er . . . are you serious? How do you wanna remember that?
As a Cloud Professional, it always pay off to know some key pricings off the top of your head. Of course you will check the details online, or agentwise, but . . . as a Cloud Professional, it always pay out (literally) to know some key pricings off the top of your head, notably in ARB, but not just . . . A standard human brain was wired to count on the body fingers. One to Ten. Zero at worst. Therefore, rather than fighting my natural wiring to remember fractional unit cost decimal numbers, I’m instead advocating to remember the reciprocal value: $1 buys you X units | $1 every Y hoursThe above example becomes "$1 buys you 555 GB of S3 DA, and $1 buys you 42 GB per month of std S3. Isn’t that much easier to remember?
- What do you think? Clever neuroscience hack?
Allez, Goodietime! Here’s my cheatsheet, which I named AWS-FinOps-$1-buys-you.txt
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Data is money
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VPC*: $1 buys you 100 GB of cross-AZ EC2|RDS <=> EC2|RDS
*: inc. VPC peering
TGW: $1 buys you 50 GB
AWS Backup: $1 buys you 50 GB of cross-region copy* (*: std price, same price as S3 Cross-Region Replication)
NAT: $1 buys you 21 GB
ANF: $1 buys you 15 GB (*Amazon Network Firewall)
S3 Deep Archive $1 buys you 1 TB/month
S3 Glacier FR: $1 buys you 280 GB/month *: Flexible Retrieval
S3 Glacier IR $1 buys you 250 GB/month *: Instant Retrieval
S3 Standard: $1 buys you 43 GB/month
(also, $1 buys you at least 2.5M GET requests and ~200k PUT or polling requests)
FSx for NetApp ONTAP: $1 buys you at most 80 GB/month,
but as little as 4 GB/month for a 2-AZ resilient deployment
(+ throughput, + backup storage option at $1 buys you 18 GB)
=> Good news, you can rely on compression. 2.85 avg ratio is usually observed.
AWS Backup: $1 buys you 20 GB/Month of Backup storage
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Time is money
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EIP: $1 every 200 hours
AWS Site-to-Site VPN Connection (Base charge):
$1 every 200 hours
RDS for Pg: $1 buys you 62 hours with 20 GB storage
NAT: $1 every 21 hrs
TGW attachment: $1 every 20 hrs
AWS Site-to-Site VPN Connection (Base charge):
$1 every 20 hours
ANF: $1 every 2.5 hrs (freebie: 1 free NAT Gwy use)
Voilà, I hope you found this alternate view interesting. Let me know if you intend to adopt this reciprocal view of pricing. In the meantime, deploy well!