Rick Kipfer's picture

Hey there, sorry if this was covered somewhere, I've searched everywhere on the AWS site and TKL forums. Maybe it's one of those things that is just hard to search for.

Does anyone know what this is on my AWS bill? So far, I'm being billed nothing for my actual servers (I'm assuming because of the free tier), but there is this...

$0.10 per 1 million I/O requests

of which I have over 10 million and am so far running a balance of $1.05. Yet I can't find anywhere in the AWS pricing reference to a discription of what this actually is.

Anyone else have any ideas? My servers aren't even in production yet and this cost projected into a production environment could be financially deadly. I have to figure it out!

Thanks!

Rick

Forum: 
Rick Kipfer's picture

Okay, I finally gathered that it has something to do with EBS. But that doesn't REALLY bring me closer to understanding what an "I/O" is. Is it just what would be considered a 'read' or 'write' to a local harddrive if it was a standalone machine? And does that mean that S3 backed instances simply don't have this charge? 

I'm still in the dark. :(

Jeremy Davis's picture

From the AWS forums: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=78919

And a blog post that may be useful?: http://www.ghidinelli.com/2009/05/26/estimating-io-requests-ec2-ebs-costs

As you can read, it is basically I/O between the EC2 instance and the EBS volume. So cacheing will reduce your I/O...

Rick Kipfer's picture

Ah, great, that's exactly what I was looking for, thanks!

Chris Musty's picture

Chris Musty

Director

Specialised Technologies

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