
Amazon EBS 'DeleteOnTermination' attributeīy default, Amazon EBS root device volumes are automatically deleted when the instance terminates. For example, in US-EAST-1 : EBS Volume (gp2) - $0.08 per GB-monthĮBS Snapshot - $0.05 per GB-month of data stored 2.2. Because Amazon EBS does not save empty blocks, it is likely that the snapshot size will be considerably less than your volume size. Snapshot storage is based on the amount of space your data consumes in Amazon S3. If you don't need the EC2 instances again, its good to backup data in cheaper storage like Amazon S3 bucket or simply create an Amazon Machine Image. If you have an EBS volume attached to the EC2 instance, you will continue to pay for storage. Yes, this is correct, but only for the compute and data transfer costs. It is a common saying for EC2 - when you stop the instances, you stop paying. Read more information on the Disaster Recovery (DR) objectives in the AWS documentation 2. Hence, the frequency and retention of backups must be selected depending on the RTO/RPO discussed with your business stakeholders. No one would be using a 13th days old 2nd backup to restore database, the data already was too old for the system to be up and running. If you just do a rough calculation on above items, you can estimate that they must be paying 100s, if not 1000s, of dollars on unnecessary backups that were useless in case of a disaster, if any. Additional backup storage for your provisioned database storage is billed at $0.095 per GiB-month.
BACKUP TO AWS S3 PRICING PLUS
Plus there was 1 automated snapshot everyday retained for 7 days.
BACKUP TO AWS S3 PRICING MANUAL
True story: couple of my customers were taking manual snapshots of RDS instances every 4 hrs, storing them for 15 days, and each backup being more than 500 GB. This is great compared to being completely ignorant and not taking backups.

Sometimes customers want to be extra cautious while taking database backups. Backup frequency and retention in services like Amazon RDS

Let's talk about some of the commonly ignored ones : 1. These are some of the obvious (but often ignored) items that customers can do to save cost as they build and grow on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Sharing with you typical cost savings tips I have shared with customers as a Solutions Architect.
