Forrester’s Cloud App Migration Cost Model

Forrester’s Cloud App Migration Cost Model

A great thing about migration from dedicated servers to a cloud platform is that this complex process also allows business owners to test their operations, such as productivity and services in real-life. You need to ensure that customer requirements met seamlessly throughout the data migration process. The migration process should make sure that every configuration which makes the workload ready for cloud technology is performed. Once the technicalities are taken care of, the main question which comes to your mind is about the total cost of migration of your core applications to a public cloud.

According to the Forrester’s Cloud App migration cost model, the migration planning and design costs are charged for:

  • Developing preliminary business case – This involves building a business case, or cases, for the total number of applications that need to be migrated.
  • Researching nonfunctional requirements – This includes specifying non-functional requirements, such as a number of users, reliability, compliance restriction, data volume, response times, research and security.
  • Researching on identity and security – This process involves determining the users’ identity, their roles and checking their permission levels.
  • Researching functional requirements – This includes identifying on-site application elements – such as database, software libraries, application modules, etc – that will need to be migrated and re-hosted on a cloud platform. It determines elements will be rebuilt in the cloud or be replaced completely with SaaS and other cloud application services.
  • Migration teams & support – This involves identifying the teams responsible for carrying out the migration project as well as integrating supporting apps that help the process.

With these elements in mind, you can calculate the total cost of migration to cloud services for your enterprise applications. However you, as the business owner, will need to learn the more detailed factors which influence your cloud migration costs.

How are Enterprise Applications Prepped for Migration?

According to industry professionals, AD&D, short for Application, Development and delivery, is a demanding but important process. This is because during and after the migration process the success of enterprises relies heavily on using new ways to maintain the connection with their customers and the market. Digital channels and methods are a great way to ensure seamless connectivity with today’s digital-savvy consumer.

To ensure a smooth and effective AD&D process, the functional and non-functional requirements need to be identified. This step also requires designing a potential layout of a cloud landscape and how your enterprise applications will look before and after the migration process is done. According to Forrester’s Cloud App Migration Cost Model, the charges for the AD&D process makes up for half of the total cost of cloud migration for business owners.

Why preparing your enterprise applications for cloud migration is important?

There are two major benefits of having a team of migration experts uses their extensive research and practice to help determine the cost of AD&D.

  1. It builds the perfect migration strategy according to the relevant business and consumer base.
  2. It creates ways to save costs in the future by decreasing the planning costs for every subsequent migrating application project.

When you develop the perfect migration model and strategy, it allows migration managers and their teams to learn and create an even more cost-efficient plan for the next migration.

How Helpful are the Different Cost Models for Different Functionalities?

Amazon and Netflix are a perfect example of the trend of cloud platforms which is seizing the industrial giants across the globe. According to a private survey by Forrester, enterprises are beginning to seek alternatives to mobile-app focused hosting strategies. Other systems-of-engagement projects, such as systems of record and systems of insight are being preferred in public clouds nowadays.

3 Benefits of Choosing to Migrate Enterprise Applications to Public Cloud through Cloud Migration Services

These are three distinct benefits when you choose an expert and reliable cloud migration service provider.

1 – Increasing cost-efficiency of migrating applications

As mentioned earlier, the cost of moving the first applications is always higher and gets lower with each subsequent application migration. Once the process is deemed sufficiently cost-effective, the migration manager and team do not have to repeatedly put in the same effort, time and charge for the design and implementation of a feasible migration strategy.

2 – Easier application migration process

Moving your on-site business applications requires creating and developing new codes as well as making considerable revisions in the current code. Most business applications need to be modified in some way to a successful migration. Identifying these codes in the initial stages of planning your migration strategy helps to avoid the additional cost of rebuilding or re-configuring fundamental codes in the future.

3 – Makes your business flexible

Cloud migration often opens up new ways of earning revenue as well as attracting a new set of customers apart from retaining the existing ones. Migrating to the cloud makes your business extremely flexible in terms of rebuilding, quick updating, modifying and customizing elements for taking complete advantage of the scalability and on-demand services of cloud platforms.

The otherwise complex process of migrating enterprise applications to the cloud platform becomes seamless and cost-effective when you hire an expert cloud migration manager.

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How to Calculate the Average Cost of Cloud Migration

How to Calculate the Average Cost of Cloud Migration

The adoption of cloud technology till date has mostly been to create and configure applications only in a Cloud data center. Along with applications, their matching developing elements also need to be created and configured completely in the cloud.

As cloud services and technologies get advanced, IT enterprises will also be more experienced. This will develop a need to movie existing conventional application systems to private and public cloud servers. Sweet migration of infrastructure to the Cloud should be a top priority from IT organizations. However, one of the most prominent factors that help finalize the decision to migrate company infrastructure to the cloud is the average cost of cloud migration.

The main question for business owners and entrepreneurs regarding migration cost is choosing the more cost-efficient option between migrating existing infrastructure and applications or build a new set of applications from scratch in the cloud.

How to Calculate the Average Cost of Cloud Migration?

Estimating the exact cost of moving your IT infrastructure from servers to a cloud environment is a complicated process. But if the cost is one of the deciding factors for you, then you can use the tips given below and calculate the average cost of cloud migration.

1 – Audit cost of existing IT Infrastructure

Accurate knowledge of your existing infrastructure is important and an audit is the best way to get it. The audit will show the current cost you are paying to run your IT infrastructure and give a good preview of how your infrastructure would look on the cloud server. This information will help you to get a better clue of the cost of cloud resources your infrastructure is likely to consume.

Keep an impartial attitude and figure out the complete cost of using and maintenance of on-site IT assets for a year. This should also include the cost of other resources and not just the cost of the infrastructure. There are two different types of cost to consider when adding the total cost for IT resources:

  • Direct costs – Direct costs are easy to calculate as they reflect on your balance sheet. These include the cost of hardware and software, including the amount paid for physical servers, maintenance contracts, software licenses, warranties, materials, supplies, spare parts, etc. Seek the help of your accounts department with past invoices, payment records and purchase orders. While you’re at it, you can also find out the cost of storage, database and bandwidth that is consumed over a year with your servers and broadband. There are several operational costs to be considered too, such as technician charges for maintaining your server, database and other technologies. The cost of internet connectivity along with the cost of real-estate, staff and other facilities that house your IT infrastructure is another direct cost in operations.
  • Indirect costs – Indirect costs are more difficult to identify and calculate but are equally important to consider before migration to cloud technology. A major indirect cost is the loss of productivity of employees and customers when your on-site server experiences downtime. You can review log files and deduce the frequency of failure of your servers and the average duration of downtimes too. Multiplying the total time by an average hourly rate you can estimate the average loss in revenue as well.

2 – Get an estimate of cloud infrastructure costs

Once you have figured out the cost of your existing IT infrastructure you will need to calculate the average cost of using and maintaining your applications in the cloud environment. Leading IaaS providers, such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, etc provide a handy cost calculator for their services and products on their individual official websites. There are several reliable third-party cost calculators also which give an accurate calculation of the cost to use cloud services and technologies based on your specific requirements.

3 – Calculate the cost of cloud migration

Lastly, you need to get an estimate of the cost of executing the cloud migration process. The volume of data and the number of servers, along with integration and app testing, as well as the consultation fees will mainly determine the cost of the migration process.

What is the Average Cost of Cloud Migration?

Generally, the migration of conventional server-based applications database to cloud servers is more of a services-driven activity. Customers need to hire well-trained engineers who can skillfully convert, transport and reconfigure data at every step through the complex migration process. This is a major factor that increases the cost of migration to clouds in a conventional way. On an average, the manual effort and hours required to perform the migration process successfully are charged as low as US$ 1,000 per server to as much as US$ 3,000 per server and can even go up to US$ 15,000 for complicated cases.

Cloud servers offer impressive scalability and there is potential to migrate an immense number of servers to the cloud environment right now. The only solution for cost-efficient cloud migration is with automated cloud migration services from leading IT service providers.

DynamoDB on Demand Pricing

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Learn Everything About DynamoDB Streams Pricing

Everything to know About AWS DynamoDB Streams Pricing

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service whereas DynamoDB Streams allows you to capture a time-ordered sequence of item-level modifications made to your DynamoDB tables. These streams are available upto 24 hours. While processing the stream records, you can use a Lambda function to process the stream records in real-time, applications can access this log as changes appear before and after, making it easier to keep track of the changes to your DynamoDB tables.

DynamoDB Streams can be enabled by setting the stream on a table. This can be done by selecting the table you want to enable the stream on, and then clicking on the “Manage Stream” button. Once the stream is enabled, stream records can be accessible, the best approach to consume such records is using a Lambda function. This will enable you to easy scale up to compensate near real time processing.

Each record in the stream logs a modification to an item in the table and contains both the new and old image of the item. You can fetch either original item or new image that hold modified item. You will have an option to choose to retrieve only the keys of the modified items or the full item images. If you consider the cost of DynamoDB Streams, accessing only the keys is cheaper comparing the item itself. This might be useful if you only need what has been changed but not the item itself but if you need to access additional information about the item, you need to retrieve the item itself, it will cost more but you will have either original or modified version of the item.

You should use a primary key to identify and fetch each stream record. The primary key is composed of the table’s partition key and sort key (if applicable). Cost of DynamoDB Streams is calculated as streams read request unit which is GetRecords API call to DynamoDB Streams. Each streams read request unit can return up to 1 MB of data. If you are using DynamoDB triggers, you won’t be charged for GetRecords API calls invoked by AWS Lambda or invoked by DynamoDB global tables.

DynamoDB Streams

  • AWS launched the DynamoDB Streams to give users a chronological sequence of changes at the item level in any DynamoDB table.
  • It restores the changes in their original form and stores them for a period of 24 hours.
  • This is a great way to boost the power of DynamoDB through change notifications, cross-region replication, continuous analytics with Redshift integration and similar situations.
  • This is a low-cost addition to your existing DynamoDB package but small and medium business owners can benefit greatly from the extremely affordable DynamoDB Streams pricing.

Have a look at the cost of DynamoDB & let’s get to explore a little more about this excellent feature.


What are the Uses of DynamoDB Streams?

Before reading further, try to remember if any of these questions ever occurred to you:

  • How do I set up a network across multiple tables so that based on the value of an item in one table, I can also update the item on the second table?
  • How to trigger events based on individual transactions?
  • How do I replicate data across multiple tables?
  • How do I archive or audit transactions in DynamoDB?

On the one hand, relational databases offer native support to perform transactions, auditing, triggers and replication. In general, a transaction is any CRUD (create, read, update & delete) operation among multiple tables within a block. However, a transaction can only have two results – success (or) failure. As DynamoDB is a NoSQL database, it does not support transactions.

  • In such cases, the DynamoDB Streams works as the best solution. DynamoDB Streams is extremely powerful and can easily collaborate with other AWS services to perform similar complex problems.
  • When activated, DynamoDB Streams is an excellent way to capture changes to items from a DynamoDB table as soon as the modification is done.

There are several ways where this feature is extremely useful, such as when:

  • An application modifies data in a DynamoDB table in one AWS Region. Another application immediately reads the modifications to data and stores the information on the changed data on another table. This creates a replica that is always synchronized with the original table.
  • A mobile app is able to modify data in DynamoDB tables at the rate of thousands of updates every second. A second application can capture and store the information about the updates, which helps to provide almost real-time and accurate usage metrics for the mobile app.
  • Any global multi-player game has a multi-master topology it follows, whose data is stored in several AWS Regions at once. This way, every master can stay synchronized by accessing and processing the changes which develop in the more remote AWS Regions.
  • A social networking app alerts every user with a notification on their mobile device when a friend in a group uploads a new post.
  • A new customer can fill data in a DynamoDB table. This causes another application to send out an automatic welcome email to the new customer.

There are numerous other such scenarios when DynamoDB Streams becomes an exceptionally efficient tool. The log of data modification information stored by DynamoDB Streams can be accessed by other applications to view the sequence of every modification and get a clear view of their original form and the modified form almost instantly.


How much is the DynamoDB Streams pricing?

AWS offers the DynamoDB in two distinct packages based on their capacity modes:

  • DynamoDB Provisioned Capacity
  • DynamoDB On-Demand Capacity

The DynamoDB provisioned capacity mode lets developers choose the number of resources every database will need to perform its functions beforehand. The developers may also have to decide whether they need auto-scaling of resources or whether the database should start ignoring requests once the specified limit of resources is reached.

On the other hand, the DynamoDB on-demand capacity will automatically increase or decrease the number of allocated resources as per fluctuation in API requests and charges according to data usage on a monthly basis.

To understand the complex pricing plans, you need to be aware of certain technical terms, such as:

  • Read requestThis is an API call to read data from a specific DynamoDB table.
  • Write request This is an API call to add, modify or delete items in the DynamoDB table.

1 read request can be up to 4 KB. Every additional read request is rounded up according to 4 KB sizes.
1 write request can be up to 1 KB. Every additional write request is rounded up according to 1 KB size.


DynamoDB Streams Pricing

Amazon Web Services charges DynamoDB Streams pricing at US$ 0.02 per 100,000 reads or write requests. The charges for the feature are the same in the On-Demand and Provisioned Capacity modes.


Further Thoughts

DynamoDB Streams is an excellent way to maintain an accurate and chronologically arranged log of every change to items on your DynamoDB tables.

See Also

AWS DynamoDb Basics

AWS DynamoDB FAQs

AWS DynamoDb Cost Best-Practices

DynamoDB On Demand Pricing

DynamoDb Cost Calculator


  • CloudySave is an all-round one stop-shop for your organization & teams to reduce your AWS Cloud Costs by more than 55%.
  • Cloudysave’s goal is to provide clear visibility about the spending and usage patterns to your Engineers and Ops teams.
  • Have a quick look at CloudySave’s Cost Calculator to estimate real-time AWS costs.
What is DynamoDB Cost Calculator and it’s Uses

What is DynamoDB Cost Calculator?

What is DynamoDB Cost Calculator Anyway?

The DynamoDB is an excellent NoSQL alternative to Cassandra. This system is designed, developed and provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) to medium and large-sized business corporations. It is an excellent tool for ensuring reliable performance, creating pliant data models and automatically scaling the throughput capacity. The landing pages created using AWS DynamoDB are most preferred by leading companies from the advertising technology, mobile & web gaming and IoT industries.

For those with whom performance matters as much as cost-efficiency, then it is highly advisable for potential buyers to be aware of the pricing details of the DynamoDB service costs so that they can make calculated decisions.

How is DynamoDB pricing determined?

Amazon offers incredible flexibility in services as well as its cost. The DynamoDB storage is charged according to one of two different pricing models – Provisioned Capacity and On-Demand Capacity. In general, the total cost of DynamoDB services is calculated by the numbers of reading and write requests and the volume of data stored on servers on a monthly basis.

Here’s how the main factors influence DynamoDB storage pricing:

Data Storage

AWS DynamoDB charges for storing data by the GBs of disk space which the tables consume. The first 25 GB data storage is free every month while any data stored over 24 GB is charged around US$ 0.25 per GB per month.

Write Requests

AWS charges for API write requests by measuring the Write Capacity Unit (WCU) consumed by individual users. One WCU allows users to write 1 request per second, which is sufficient to write 2.6 million write requests every month. After the first 25 GB free, users are charged around 1 WCU for every write request of less than 1 KB and 2 WCUs for Transactional write requests.

Read Requests

AWS charges for API read requests by measuring the total number of Read Capacity Unit (RCU) consumed by the user on a monthly basis. One RCU allows users to send around 2 read requests per second, which comes to an astonishing 5.2 million read requests per month. After the first 25 GB free storage, AWS charges 1 RCU for every Strongly Consistent read request (of up to 4 KB) while 2 RCUs are needed for 2 Transactional read requests. For a half RCU, users can perform 1 Eventually Consistent read request.

Provisioned Throughput

Auto-scaling for handling increased traffic observance costs extra WCUs and RCUs when users have specified their utilization target in DynamoDB Provisioned Capacity mode. This means when your usage crosses your expected specified limits, then AWS will charge you extra for it on the monthly bills.

Reserved Capacity

If you have sufficient know-how of your traffic and capacity of the application to manage your workload, then the Reserved Capacity mode is highly advised for you. This mode allows users to save significantly with a 1-year contract, with only a one-time upfront fee for the additional service.

Indexed Storage

DynamoDB charges to store indexes. An additional 100 bytes of storage is charged per item on account of the indexes. These indexes are then included in your monthly bill for data storage.

Data Transfer

If you have the need to transfer data between different AWS regions, then AWS will charge you extra for this service.

Caching

If you need a cache in front of your DynamoDB then be prepared to pay extra. The DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is charged on an hourly basis according to the type of instance chosen.

Streams

The DynamoDB Streams is another excellent product from AWS. It is a time-ordered sequence of item-level changes for DynamoDB tables. The first 2.5 million reads per month are completely free while every 100,000 reads over that limit are charged at around US$ 0.02.

How does the DynamoDB Cost Calculator work?

Simply put, the DynamoDB cost calculator works to estimate the cost of using AWS services and products. Users simply need to search and add the AWS services they are seeking to use. Enter the details of usage for the services and the calculator immediately gives an estimated cost of every product and service accordingly.

How does the DynamoDB Cost Calculator works

How does the DynamoDB Cost Calculator works

Some of the major benefits of using AWS cost calculator are:

  • Transparent Pricing – It gives an accurate estimate of the price of the product or service package you are choosing to buy from Amazon Web Services. This helps to analyze and improve your infrastructure costs.
  • Multi-Regional Support – Users can configure services or groups of services across multiple AWS regions. The cost calculator estimates the price of services according to specific AWS regions as it varied from region to region.
  • Export Estimates – Users can also choose to share their estimates to a fresh .csv file for analyzing their potential cost structure in-depth.

The DynamoDB price calculator is an excellent tool to ensure that the AWS services and products are within your budget and not a strain on your estimated business finances.

DynamoDB on demand pricing

What makes DynamoDB On-Demand Pricing an Affordable Buy for Businesses

What makes DynamoDB On Demand Pricing an Affordable Buy for Businesses?

Till a few years ago, it was an enormous task to create databases that supported businesses with efficient scalability and at the same time providing regular low latency levels. This same task was made easier back in 2012 when Amazon Web Services launched its DynamoDB. Now, the DynamoDB storage is filled with several efficiency-enhancing features.

Businesses have found the features extremely effective, in terms of increasing productivity and elevating cost-efficiency in operations. The DynamoDB allowed users to completely manageable, region-wide multi-master database tables with incredible features, including:

  • In-memory caching
  • Encryption at rest
  • 99% uptime SLA (Service Level Agreement)
  • Point-in-time recovery, etc

The cost-efficiency of the DynamoDB was greatly enhanced with the launch of the On-Demand model.

What is DynamoDB On Demand Pricing Model?

The DynamoDB on demand pricing model is a new, flexible billing method for users. It is designed to serve thousands of reading and write AP requests every second without the need for capacity planning beforehand. DynamoDB on demand model only charges with a simple pay-per-request method. This way, users need to pay according to their usage only.

What is DynamoDB On Demand Pricing Model

What is DynamoDB On Demand Pricing Model

This is a great way to level the performance to cost ratio for your business.

In the on-demand mode tables, DynamoDB immediately adapts to the fluctuating workload from users as the average traffic level tends to go up and down. When the traffic level crosses the previous high threshold the DynamoDB instantly expands to accommodate the increase in workload.

Using the DynamoDB console, users can create new tables in the On-Demand read / write Capacity Mode and can even switch to Provisioned Mode by clicking on the Capacity tab.

Tables created in the On-Demand mode support all DynamoDB features, except for auto-scaling as it is not allowed in this mode.

However, when indexes are created using the tables in On-Demand mode, they have the regular billing model and scalability. Users are not required to enter throughput capacity for indexes because the charges are according to usage. If you do not need to use the On-Demand mode and its indexes then you are charged only for the data storage.

Who Needs to Get DynamoDB On-Demand Pricing Model?

One of the biggest concerns for users is capacity planning. The other is of having to pay more than their usage.

Thus, if you cannot predict your traffic pattern and are worried about exponentially high billing, then you need to switch to DynamoDB on-demand pricing.

Here’s why:

If you have unpredictable traffic patterns

Under the conventional DynamoDB Provisioned billing model, users are charged according to the capacity of handling specific numbers of API request throughput. Users are billed for reading and write capacity units.

Every read capacity unit lets users send 1 read request throughput each second. The same way, every writes capacity unit lets users send 1 write request each second. Users need to pay for read/write capacity units on an hourly basis. This mode charges normally around US$ 0.00013 per hour for reading capacity units and around US$ 0.00065 per hour for write capacity units.

If, for instance, you need 30 capacity units in a month, then the read capacity units will cost around US$ 0.09 per month, while the write capacity units come at around US$ 0.47 for a month. If all capacity units are utilized completely, every unit should give users 2,592,000 requests in a 30-day period. This way, users will have to pay around US$ 0.036 per 1 million read requests and pay around US$ 0.18 per 1 million write requests.

However, it is highly unlikely that you will need to use all your capacity units in a month as the traffic is highly unpredictable more often. Unless you want to spend hours learning to understand the traffic patterns then using DynamoDB On-Demand is the better choice for you.

If you are worried about the costs

Not utilizing all the capacity units bought for the month tends to cost a significant amount. If you are worried about having to pay more for less use of services, then the On-Demand pricing model is far more cost-efficient as it charges according to individual read or writes requests.

This way, users only need to pay for what they use and do not have to worry about forecasting their monthly request requirements.

According to industrial experts, the DynamodB on demand is incredibly useful if users’ application traffic is unpredictable and difficult to control, if their workload fluctuates significantly or if their average use of tables is well below the peak threshold.

In simple words, you need to switch to DymanoDB On-Demand if you have:

  • New applications or databases whose workload is too complex to be predicted accurately
  • Developers who are creating server-less server stacks with pay-per-use charges
  • Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) or SaaS provider who needs a simple yet resourceful solution to deploy tables to individual subscribers.

DynamoDB On-Demand is an excellent way for users to enhance their productivity and making their API request needs more affordable.

DynamoDB storage cost

AWS cloud computing pricing

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Everything You Need to Know about DynamoDB Storage Cost

Everything You Need to Know about DynamoDB Storage Cost

Database Management Systems (DBMS) are essential for handling data storage needs in the world of IT. As an immense volume of data is generated every day on the internet and business applications combined, a large portion of this data is managed by relevant databases. This creates the need to handle raw data which is scheme-less and non-relational in nature. In the DBMS arena, this creates a major concern of providing an inexpensive and faster CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) process as it has to manage the additional joining and maintaining of relationships from the different types of data. This makes Amazon DynamoDB an ideal solution. This raises the question of DynamoDB pricing frequently.

However, no single NoSQL offers a comprehensive solution that can handle unstructured big data in a way that provides customer satisfaction and maximum value for the business. NoSQL, short for Not Only SQL database, provides a method to store data and retrieve reports apart from the tabular relations utilized in the relational databases.

NoSQL technology was popular earlier and was extensively used by major data generators, such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and others who required large-scale database management systems which could help write and read data anywhere around the globe, and at the same time offering scalability and delivering performance to massive data sets and millions of users worldwide. From the numerous NoSQL services available in the market today, the DynamoDB storage cost is significantly more attractive and feasible.

About DynamoDB from Amazon

Amazon’s DynamoDB is the most preferred NoSQL cloud database offered by the world’s leading online service provider. DynamoDB is a completely managed NoSQL cloud database platform from Amazon which is designed for storing, processing and accessing data with high performing and scale-centric applications.

About DynamoDB from Amazon

About DynamoDB from Amazon

DynamoDB is an extremely fast and immensely flexible NoSQL database service for comprehensive types of applications which require constant, single-digit millisecond latency for varying scale. This NoSQL supports key-value store and document models. It has the ability to scale and has a flexible schema, which allows users to easily change the way data is structured and can run multiple queries against it.

Today’s web-based applications frequently face challenges regarding scaling as customers grow and there is a noticeable increase in data as well as traffic. Using DynamoDB NoSQL database service, developers can scale cloud-based applications and store data on off-site servers as well as retrieve it over other Amazon Web Service (AWS) accessibility zones to provide optimal durability and integrated accessibility.

DynamoDB Cost Calculator

The DynamoDB cost calculator on the website allows buyers to measure the expense of reading, writing and storing data in their DynamoDB tables. It also shows the additional optional features that developers can choose to activate.

DynamoDB Cost Calculator

DynamoDB Cost Calculator

DynamoDB streams pricing comes in two distinct capacity modes – DynamoDB On-Demand capacity mode and DynamoDB Provisioned capacity mode. There is a significant difference between DynamoDB on-demand pricing and DynamoDB provisioned pricing. The DynamoDB On-Demand capacity mode is more popular.

DynamoDB On-Demand Pricing

Let’s check out the features and pricing for DynamoDB On-Demand capacity mode:

The DymanoDB On-Demand capacity mode lets you pay per request for every instance of data read and write by applications on your tables. There is no need to specify how much read and write you estimate the application to perform as DynamoDB automatically calculates your workload requirement and increases or decreased the capacity accordingly.

  • Read request unit – API requests to read data from your table are charged in reading request units. The platform read requests can be Strongly Consistent, Eventually Consistent or Transactional. Any Strongly Consistent read request of as much as 4 KB uses 1 request unit. For requests larger than 4 KB, extra read request units are needed. For requests up to 4 KB, Eventually, Consistent read requests need ½ read request unit, while Transactional read request needs 2 read request units.
  • Write request unit – API request to write data on your table is charged in write request units. A Standard write request unit can write items up to 1 KB. For larger than 1 KB items, extra write request units are required. A Transactional write uses 2 write request units.
  • Replicated write request unit – For DynamoDB global tables, the details of users are automatically written at multiple AWS regions according to users’ choice. Every write occurs in the local Region and the replicated Regions as well.
  • Streams read request unit – Every GetRecords API request to DynamoDB Streams is known as a streams read request unit. Every stream read request unit can return as much as 1 MB of data.
  • Transactional read / write requests – A transactional read or transactional write request in DynamoDB is different from standard read and write requests as it guarantees all operations within a single transaction either succeed or fail as a set.

DynamoDB Provisioned Pricing

In the DynamoDB provisioned capacity mode, the auto-scaling feature allows you to adjust their tables automatically according to the specified rate of usage. This ensures that you get optimal application performance at a minimal cost.

Check out the features and pricing of DynamoDB provisioned capacity mode below:

  • Read capacity unit – Every API call for reading data from your table is a read request. These are labeled as Strongly Consistent, Eventually Consistent, or Transactional. One RCU is required to read items up to 4 KB in size in the Strongly Consistent request every second. Reading items over 4 KB in size requires extra RCUs. Two RCUs are sufficient to perform two Eventually Consistent read requests on items over 4 KB, every second. However, for Transactional read requests, two RCUs are needed to perform one read every second for items up to 4 KB.
  • Write capacity unit – Every API call to write data in your table is a written request. One WCS is ideal to perform one Standard write request per second for items up to 1 KB in size. Transactional write requests need two WCUs for one write request per second for items up to 1 KB. Items larger than 1 KB require assigning additional WCUs.
  • Replicate write capacity unity – DynamoDB writes data automatically at multiple AWS regions when you use its global tables. Every write is written in the local Region and the replicated region of choice.
  • Streams read request unit – A streams read request is any GetRecords API call to DynamoDB Streams. Individual streams read request units can return a maximum of 1 MB of data.
  • Transactional read / write request – A Transactional read or write differs from the Standard read or write in DynamoDB because it ensures that every operation in an individual transaction either fails or succeeds as a set.

For complete information on DynamoDB pricing, it is advisable to visit the official Amazon Web Services DynamoDB cost calculator page. You will get the latest and updated DynamoDB storage cost there.

AWS Cost Optimization