Oracle on AWS costs
In a previous post I walked through the steps of setting up an Oracle Database on AWS RDS. It was a very simple and straight forward process. The only thing to watch out for was to open the network to allow traffic in and out. I also showed how to connect SQL Developer to that database.
I’ve been using it for a few days and needed to move onto other things for a few days. I could leave the Database up and running during this period or I could shut down the Database to save a few dollars/euro. It also gave me a chance to see how much this database cloud instance is costing me. In my previous post, it was estimated to cost about 0.89c per day.
Before we look at the Actual/Real costs, let’s walk through the steps of shutting down the database.
To stop the database, click on the Actions button on the top right hand side of the screen, just above the database summary details. You will get a confirmation window/box appearing, see image below, asking you to confirm by clicking ‘Yes, Stop Now’.
It will take a few minutes for this shutdown to complete and in my case it took approx. 8 minutes, which was a little surprising as no one was using it at the time. You might need to refresh the webpage to see this change.
That’s all very simple, but it does give you a warning about the stopped database instance. It will be restarted in 7 days time! So if this is a database you will occasionally use, then you will need to carefully manage this particular feature, otherwise you will end up with the database automatically starting and you will be paying for this.
What about the Costs?
The costs for running this service can be found in the AWS Cost Management page. Here we can see the database was running for 7 and a bit days before I shut it down, and we can see the daily cost was 0.82c. Two things note about these costs. There was larger cost for the first day. Most of this cost was associated with the setup and configuration of the database service. The second thing to note is the costs listed in this console do not include taxes.
A got the bill for this usage, and it came to $6.94, consisting of $5.64 for usage (approx. 75c per day) and $1.30 in taxes/vat. Not a lot considering some cloud services, but comes out at approx 92.5c per day, which is a little more than the estimated cost when the service was being created. A small example of what can happen between the “in theory” cost of cloud versus the actual costs.
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