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Johnny avatar Server

Amazon Elastic File System costs

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Johnny

Amazon's pricing (estimation) calculator for EFS (Elastic File System) asks to enter the average GB (or TB) of storage used per month.

This is directly from their page:

Enter the amount of EFS storage capacity you expect to use. EFS is an elastic file system that grows and shrinks based on actual usage and you pay only for what you use. We recommend you input your average usage for the month.

I interpret this as what is there each month over a period of time, so I would like a confirmation on my estimation.

Let's say I store pictures, every month I produce 1 GB of pictures which I store in EFS. So the first month I have 1GB, the next month I have 2GB in storage and so forth.

The monthly average over a period of 12 months:

[1GB x (1+2+3+...+12)]/12 = 6.5GB/month

Is this the "monthly average" that I have to enter in the price calculator? I do not see any other answer which will not hurt Bezos :)

Edit:

I should add that I could not find a price estimation example for an ever growing storage use (or even growing for sometime). That is why I am asking whether my reasoning is sound or not in this case.

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cn flag
shearn89
No, you pay per total GB stored. So if you have 1GB in month 1, you pay X. 2GB in month 2, you pay 2X that month. If in 6 months it's grown to 120GB, you pay 120X that month.
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cn flag
shearn89
If your storage is ever-growing, it's going to get expensive and you may want to look at a retention policy.
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Johnny avatar
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Johnny
@shearn89 thanks. That is exactly what I was asking. The problem with the cost calculator is that it forces you to put a monthly use. For an ever growing storage this is problematic because, when budgeting, you need to try to come up with an average over a period. Retention policy somehow lower the costs, but I guess S3 glacier is the way to go when you have, as in my case, Terabytes of data (the example, was to simplify the problem)
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cn flag
shearn89
Ah okay. Yes, glacier is the best (only sensible!) option for long-term storage that's not accessed except for e.g. compliance purposes where you might have to store data for years.
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cn flag
shearn89

Just to summarize my comments as an answer:

  • You pay per total GB stored. So if you have 1GB in month 1, you pay X. 2GB in month 2, you pay 2X that month. If in 6 months it's grown to 120GB, you pay 120X that month.
  • If your storage is ever-growing, it's going to get expensive and you may want to look at a retention policy.
  • If using S3, a lifecycle policy is a must to keep costs affordable. This will allow you to move long-term stuff to e.g. Glacier.
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Johnny avatar
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Johnny
I accept your answer even if it has an error in the calculation, the storage grows steadily 1GB per month, so at 6 months I will have 6GB, that is why the average is 6.58GB per month... first month 1GB, second 2GB, third 3GB, eleventh 11GB, twelfth 12GB... average [1GB * (1+2+3+...+12)]/12 = 6.58GB/month :)
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cn flag
shearn89
Yeah, my calculation was not intended to be accurate for your use case, just an example of how the pricing model works...
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