One of the thrilling things about cloud computing is sticker shock. It’s OK once you’ve established your pattern of usage and know roughly how much you’ll pay each month, but for an experimenter like me, strange things can happen. Like that time last year I tried something out, it didn’t work, then a month later I got a bill for $40 because I hadn’t deleted a thing and I didn’t even know what the thing did. So it was that this month I was a bit worried, as the site had been running somewhat properly for a few weeks.
So after that stress, $12 is good news! It suggests that I’m doing something right and that I can keep this up.
I’ll explain what the bits are. RDS is Relational Database Service – the database. AWS does automatic backups and so on – we tried it at work the other day, it’s pretty nice – so for that money they’re keeping our data safe. EC2 is the virtual computer that the blog runs on. It’s a tiny one, so it could be free, but I think I used up my quota of free EC2s already. Route 53 is the DNS (Dynamic Name Service), i.e. the bit that tells the world where stats.drfriendless.com, extstats.drfriendless.com, api.drfriendless.com and blog.drfriendless.com are – they are all different computers, if they exist at all. Data transfer is costs for downloading from BGG. 4c seems reasonable. Of the “other” 5c, 4c is for S3 (Something Simple Storage) which is like a big hard drive, and 1c is for API Gateway, which is the bit that implements api.drfriendless.com by turning API requests into calls to lambdas.
There’s no charge for Lambdas, as I seem to be under the free limit still. When I get more stuff going I might have to pay 20c for that. However that is where I’ve put most of my effort recently – trying to keep them small, and trying to make them do their job and not run uselessly.
I love it when a plan comes together.
