I have several TB of borg backups. Uploaded them on backblaze b2. I could immediately see how much resources i was using, how many api calls, and so on. Very easy to see and predict the next bill. I can see exactly which bucket uses more resource, and which is growing over time.
Because I’m cheap, I want to upload those files on aws glacier, which theoretically costs a quarter of b2 for storage, but API calls are extremely expensive. So I want to know the details. I won’t like to get a bill with $5 in storage and $500 in API calls.
Uploaded a backup, but nowhere in AWS I can see how much resources i am using, how much I’m going to pay, how many API calls, how much the user XYZ spent, and so on.
It looks like it’s designed for an approach like “just use our product freely, don’t worry about pricing, it’s a problem for the financial department of your company”.
In AWS console I found “s3 storage lens”, but it says i need to delegate the access to someone else because reasons. Tried to create another user in my 1-user org, but after wasting 2 hours I wasn’t able to find a way to add those permissions.
Tried to create a dashboard in “AWS cost explorer” but all the indicators are null or zero.
So, how can I see how many API calls and storage is used, to predict the final bill? Or the only way is to pray and wait the end of the month and hopefully there everything it’s itemized in detail?
i also use amazon, and i watch the costs like a hawk. it can explode quickly.
if youre cost concerned, i would not recommend amazon. although a mature environment, youre paying for it.
that said, the cost explorer is your friend. sorting by ‘usage type’ over time is what made it start working for me.
i was also able to throw that metric into a default cloudfront dashboard.
if you want serious details, you may need to do as they say and create the user, to access the required metrics.
from recollection you need to create a user who can access the API required to grab the metrics you want. Even in their own system, this user needs to exist before they can show you metrics using their own api.
i ran into similar security accessing my s3 bucket proceduraly.
created new account in https://us-east-1.console.aws.amazon.com/organizations/v2/home/accounts
for some reason got another 12 months of free usage (which was expired on my account)
waited 3 minutes to get the aws account id, before it wasn’t appearing
delegated new account in https://s3.console.aws.amazon.com/s3/lens/organization-settings/add-account?region=us-east-1
had no idea about the password, tried to get details on user, it complained that “AWS Account Management trusted access is not enabled”
enabled it here https://us-east-1.console.aws.amazon.com/organizations/v2/home/services/AWS Account Management
still have no idea how to access this new account, i don’t know the password, they only sent me a welcome email
If you create a new account you should have configured a root email address for it. That one should have received an email to login and set the initial password IIRC.
You can get an estimate of what it’s going to cost by going to https://calculator.aws
Upload to AWS shouldn’t really cost much, unless you’re sending a lot of API put requests. Since they are backups I’m going to guess the files are large and will be uploaded as Multi-Part and will probably invoke multiple API calls to do the upload.
My suggestion would be to upload it to s3 and have it automatically transition to glacier for you using a lifecycle rule.
Cost explorer would be your best bet to get an idea of what it’ll cost you at the end of the month as it can do a prediction. There is (unfortunately) not a way to see how many API requests you’ve already done IIRC.
Going by the s3 pricing page, PUT requests are $ 0.005 per 1000 requests( N. Virginia ).
Going by a docs example
For this example, assume that you are generating a multipart upload for a 100 GB file. In this case, you would have the following API calls for the entire process. There would be a total of 1002 API calls.https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/mpuoverview.html
Assuming you’re uploading 10x 100gb according to the upload scheme mentioned above you’d make 10.020 API calls which would cost you 10 * 0.005= 0.05$.
Then there would be the storage cost on glacier itself and the 1 day storage on s3 before it transitioned to glacier.
Retrieving the data will also cost you, as well as downloading the retrieved data from s3 back to your device. If we’re talking about a lot of small files you might incur some additional costs of the KMS key you used to encrypt the bucket.
I typed all this on my phone and it’s not very practical to research like this. I don’t think I’d be able to give you a 100% accurate answer if I was on my pc.
There’s some hidden costs which aren’t Hidden if you know they exist.
Note that (imo) AWS is mostly aimed at larger organisations and a lot of things ( like VMs ) are often cheaper elsewhere. It’s the combination or everything AWS does and can do so that makes it worth the while. Once you have your data uploaded to s3 you should be able to see a decent estimate in cost explorer.
Note that extracting all that data back from s3 to your onprem or anywhere or you decide to leave AWS will cost you a lot more than what it cost you to put it there.
Hope this helps!