☁️ Day 15: AWS Pricing & Calculator – Master Cloud Costs
Category: Cost Management
Goal: Understand how AWS pricing works and how to estimate costs using the AWS Pricing Calculator.
🧠 What You’ll Learn Today:
- Why AWS uses a pay-as-you-go model
- How AWS pricing works (basic concepts)
- What is the AWS Pricing Calculator
- How to use it step-by-step
- Real example to estimate AWS costs
💸 1. AWS Pay-As-You-Go Pricing
AWS doesn’t charge like traditional hosting companies.
You pay only for what you use:
- Use a service for 5 hours? Pay for 5 hours.
- Store 10 GB of data? Pay only for 10 GB.
There are no long-term contracts unless you choose to commit for discounts.
📊 2. Key Pricing Concepts to Know
Here are common terms in AWS pricing:
- On-Demand Pricing: Pay for compute/hour or GB stored. No commitment.
- Reserved Instances: Commit to 1 or 3 years → Get lower prices.
- Free Tier: New users get 12 months of free usage (like 750 hours/month for EC2).
✅ Example of Free Tier:
- 750 hrs/month of EC2 (t2.micro)
- 5 GB of S3 storage
- 25 GB/month of DynamoDB
🧮 3. What Is AWS Pricing Calculator?
A free online tool from AWS to estimate monthly bills.
👉 Link: https://calculator.aws.amazon.com
You can add services like:
- EC2 instances
- S3 storage
- RDS databases
- Lambda functions
…and get a cost breakdown before using anything!
🧱 4. How to Use AWS Pricing Calculator (Step-by-Step)
Let’s say you want to estimate EC2 + S3:
Step 1: Go to the Pricing Calculator
Step 2: Click “Add service” → Select EC2
Step 3: Fill in:
- Region (e.g. US East)
- Instance type (e.g. t2.micro)
- Usage time (e.g. 720 hrs/month)
- Add storage (EBS)
Step 4: Add S3
- Choose storage amount (e.g. 10 GB)
- Set requests if needed (PUT/GET)
Step 5: Click “Estimate”
📋 You’ll see a full monthly cost report.
💡 5. Why It Matters
✅ Helps plan cloud budget
✅ Avoids surprise bills
✅ Useful for company cost projections
✅ Great for certification exam understanding
✅ End of the Day Notes:
Today you learned:
- AWS follows a pay-per-use pricing model
- The Free Tier helps beginners experiment risk-free
- You can use the AWS Pricing Calculator to estimate service costs
- Cost planning is key in real-world cloud projects
- It’s simple, visual, and accurate – no guessing needed
💡 Understanding pricing is not just for billing teams – even DevOps and cloud engineers must know it!
🔁 Navigate the Series:
⬅️ Day 14: AWS CloudTrail vs CloudWatch – Know the Difference
➡️Day 16: IAM Best Practices – Secure Your AWS Like a Pro
