View a markdown version of this page

Additional cost components - AWS Transform
On-premises pricingNetwork costsSupport costsEnd user computingAdding other AWS services

Additional cost components

Beyond the per-workload service recommendations, AWS Transform models several cross-cutting cost components so your total cost of ownership comparison reflects the full picture on both sides of the migration.

On-premises pricing

AWS Transform estimates your current on-premises costs to provide a baseline for comparison with AWS pricing. The baseline is the sum of compute, network, and storage costs. Compute covers physical and virtual servers, hardware, software such as operating system, hypervisor, and database licenses, and facilities. Storage covers server volumes, shared storage, racks, and backup. The estimate is built from your server configurations, such as processors, cores, memory, storage, and installed software.

The baseline assumes on-premises discounts of 40 percent for hardware, 25 percent for software, and 50 percent for storage by default. You can change each of these discount rates.

Most organizations have on-premises costs that the estimate does not reflect—such as colocation contract terms, custom vendor deals, hardware refresh cycles, and maintenance contracts. You can add these directly through chat, and AWS Transform folds them into the baseline. On-premises cost adjustments are reflected in the PDF report and chat responses, but not in the PPTX export.

Example prompts:

  • "Update the on-premises server cost to $500 per server per month"

  • "My data center is a colo and I pay $10M a year in rent, add this to my on-premises costs"

  • "Add $100,000 annual maintenance costs to the on-premises baseline"

Network costs

AWS Transform estimates network costs on both sides of the comparison. On the AWS side, the network estimate represents expected data transfer overhead. It is 10 percent, by default, of the one-year No Upfront compute cost with operating system license costs removed, and the same amount applies to every pricing model. You can change the percentage, or set it to zero to remove the network estimate. On the on-premises side, network hardware, software, and maintenance costs are estimated as a percentage of server cost.

Support costs

AWS Transform includes AWS Support plan costs in the assessment based on your selected support tier, such as Business Support or Enterprise Support.

End user computing

AWS Transform assesses end user computing workloads that are candidates for Amazon WorkSpaces rather than Amazon EC2, and models the cost of running them on Amazon WorkSpaces. This lets you separate virtual desktop workloads from server workloads in your business case.

Adding other AWS services

You can add rough cost estimates for AWS services that are not fully modeled by AWS Transform assessments, so your analysis is more complete. These estimates are less accurate than the automated recommendations. For example, you can ask AWS Transform to add AWS Backup, Amazon CloudWatch, or AWS Direct Connect costs, or to move specific servers to another service such as Amazon Connect and remove them from the compute model.