View Your Account Activity

To look at the breakdown of the Amazon EC2 costs, expand the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud node on the account activity summary.

You can see in the above image, that the following resources are being tracked:

Detailed pricing for these resources can be found at http://aws.amazon.com/pricing/ec2/.

AWS tracks the number of hours your Amazon EC2 instance is running. The price depends on the type of Amazon EC2 instance and the software it is running. By default, AWS Elastic Beanstalk deploys the sample application to a minimum of one t1.micro instance and a maximum of four instances. To ensure that you stay within the free usage tier, keep the default of t1.micro, and set Auto Scaling so that the minimum number and maximum number of instances are both one. For instructions on how to configure the Auto Scaling settings in AWS Elastic Beanstalk go to Configuring Auto Scaling in the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Developer Guide. You get free usage of t1.micro instances for up to 750 hours per month. At the time of publication for this paper, the price per hour for on-demand instances for a t1.micro in the US East region is $0.02 per hour. The price varies depending on the region your Amazon EC2 instance is running.

For Elastic Load Balancing, AWS tracks the number of hours your load balancer is running, as well as the data that passes through the load balancer to the Amazon EC2 instance. By default, AWS Elastic Beanstalk creates one load balancer that directs traffic across your Amazon EC2 instances. Under the free usage tier, you get 750 hours and 15 GB of data processing free per month. At the time of publication for this paper, the price per hour in the US East region for a load balancer is $0.025 and $0.008 per GB of data processed. The price varies depending on the region where your load balancer is being used.

AWS tracks the amount of provisioned storage per gigabyte for Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes and the number of I/O requests to these volumes. In addition, if snapshots of the EBS volume are made to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), AWS tracks the amount of storage. With the free usage tier, you get 30 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) plus 2 million IOs, 1 GB snapshot storage, 10,000 snapshot Get Requests and 1,000 snapshot Put Requests. The pricing page and the following image shows the pricing for Amazon EBS at the time this paper was published. The price varies depending on the region.

AWS tracks the number of Amazon CloudWatch alarms per instance per month as well as the frequency for which the alarms are set. By default, AWS Elastic Beanstalk enables five basic Amazon CloudWatch metrics, which return data in five-minute periods and two Amazon CloudWatch alarms. AWS allows up to 10 alarms, 10 metrics, and 1,000,000 API requests. This offer does not expire after the free usage tier expires. The Amazon CloudWatch Pricing Page shows the pricing breakdown for Amazon CloudWatch. Current prices are shown in the following image. The price varies depending on the region.

This pricing information shows activity for one day. Let's look at what the price would be if you continued to run the sample AWS Elastic Beanstalk application 24 hours a day 7 days a week and continued to visit the web site once a day. Assuming that there are 30 days in a month, we can multiply the metrics by 10 to come up with a total for the month. As the following table shows, such usage would be within the free usage tier.

To look at the breakdown of the Amazon SNS costs, expand the Amazon SNS costs by expanding the Amazon Simple Notification Service node on the account activity summary.

AWS tracks the number of SNS requests, HTTP/HTTPS notifications, and email notifications each month. AWS offers up to 100,000 requests, 100,000 HTTP/HTTPS notifications, and 1,000 email notifications for free always, even after the free usage tier expires. Detailed pricing information is available at http://aws.amazon.com/pricing/sns.

The following table shows activity for three days. The requests made were to create and subscribe to the topic, and an email notification was sent to confirm the subscription. The number of requests and notifications can vary depending on the health of the application and the number of topics you subscribe to. As the table shows, the requests and the notifications are well within the limits of the free usage tier.

To look at the breakdown of the Amazon S3 costs, expand the Amazon Simple Storage Service node on the account activity summary.

This pricing information shows activity for three days. The cost is for AWS Elastic Beanstalk to get a list of all the buckets and create the Amazon S3 bucket if it doesn't already exist. AWS Elastic Beanstalk issued a second LIST request to list all the buckets when we added our email address to our environment. Unless you plan to make additional updates to your environment or upload objects to your Amazon S3 bucket, you should not continue to see additional requests.

To view a breakdown of the data transfer costs, expand the AWS Data Transfer (excluding Amazon CloudFront) node on the account activity summary.

While you are charged for data transfer out, there is no charge for inbound data transfer or data transfer between other AWS services within the same region. The outbound data transfer is aggregated across Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, and Amazon VPC and then charged at the outbound data transfer rate. This charge appears on the monthly statement as AWS Data Transfer Out. The Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) Pricing page shows the latest pricing information. The costs shown in the following image are current at the time of publication.

This pricing information shows activity for three days. Let's look at what the price would be if you continued to run the sample AWS Elastic Beanstalk application 24 hours a day 7 days a week and visit the web site once a day. Assuming that there are 30 days in a month, we can multiply the metrics by 10 to come up with a total for the month.