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Alexander
Alexander

Reputation: 41

Cost effectiveness of Amazon SimpleDB/RDS?

I'm looking at both of these services because I don't want to bother to maintain backups of my databases. My question is: how cost effective are these services? Specifically, how are they billed? I see that they're billed by hour, but what does this mean? Does it mean if I make 1 query in an hour I am billed for the full hour, or rather just for the amount of time the query took to execute?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 3030

Answers (1)

BigJoe714
BigJoe714

Reputation: 6912

As you probably know, Amazon SimpleDB is not a relation database, but a “NoSQL” service. It is billed by storage space used and data transfer in and out.

Amazon RDS are traditional MySQL servers, and you are billed for the number of hours that the server is running, as well as storage, I/O and data transfer.

Since you are looking at both of these, I’m guessing you havnt decided yet whether to use a NoSQL solution or a relational database. I am going to assume that you might be more interested in RDS since it is traditional MySQL, and I noticed you had another question about MySQL here on SO.

So the advantages of using RDS is letting them to the setup/maintenance for you, such as:

  • Managed - Amazon RDS handles time-consuming database management tasks, such as patch management, backups, and replication
  • Automated backups - This allows you to restore your DB Instance to any second during your retention period, up to the last five minutes. Your automatic backup retention period can be configured to up to eight days.
  • Scalable – extremely easy to upgrade/downgrade your DB instance if needed
  • Multi-AZ/Read Replicas – 2 replication options available of needed

You can sort of determine the cost-effectiveness by looking at the hourly rates. Let’s say you wanted 1 Small DB Instance (A small instance is 1.7 GB memory, 1 ECU (1 virtual core with 1 ECU), 64-bit platform, Moderate I/O Capacity).

A small instance is $0.11 per hour, so if you ran that for 1 year it would be $963.60 However, they also offer reserved instances, in which you pay an upfront charge but then your hourly rate is reduced.

If you purchased a 1 year reserved small instance, it would be $227.50 upfront cost, plus $0.046 per hour, so it would be $630.46 for a year.

They also have a 3 year reserved instance, which are $350 upfront and $0.046 per hour. If you ran this for 3 years it would be $752.96 for the first year and $402.96 for the second and third years.

Info from: http://aws.amazon.com/rds/

Upvotes: 4

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