I want to spin up a rack on my personal AWS account to experiment with and run some code for personal/occasional use. But will a rack generate a lot of AWS cost?
From Cameron@Convox:
A standard Rack (ECS) running t2.small costs approximately $20-$30 a month to run. Obviously running more or larger instances + RDS databases etc… can significantly increase your AWS costs
An EKS Rack costs approximately $150 a month
And… to minimize cost: “You can specify the RDS size following the instructions here: https://docs.convox.com/use-cases/resources#mysql-postgres . There is no way to turn down the Rack infrastructure. You can however use spot instances which can save you some money: https://docs.convox.com/reference/rack-parameters#spotinstancebid”
Minimum cost is as follows (for ECS-based rack):
- 3 x runtime EC2 instances (say 3 t3.small). 3 is the minimum required, and at least one of them must be on-demand.
- [optional] 1 x build EC2 instance (t3.micro can work)
- EBS space (minimum 30GB per instance)
- 1 ALB
- [optional, but enabled by default] 1 ELB for the API
- CloudWatch logs - free up to 5GB
- CloudWatch detailed metrics for the EC2 instances: ~13$
- 1 private Route53 zone: 0.5$
Assuming you will go with the bare minimum in terms of hardware i.e. 1 ALB + 3 t3.small (1 on-demand + 2 spot instances), no build instance (images will get built on the runtime instances), you would get (roughly): 16$ (ALB) + 1 * 16$ + 2 * 5$ (EC2) + 10$ (EBS)~= 52$/month. To that you add the detailed metrics and Route53 zone so 52+13+0.5 ~= 66$/month for the rack only.
It is unfortunate that detailed monitoring can’t be switched off since it represents ~20% of the rack cost for small racks (and it is pretty much useless in staging or personal racks). /cc @ddollar