Denys Rudyi - Fotolia
How does Elastic File System affect AWS storage costs?
Amazon only charges for actual storage capacity incurred in its new Elastic File System service. Fine, but what is the final price for the service?
With Amazon Elastic File System, users pay only for the storage capacity that is actually used. But it is still important to consider how charges occur.
AWS Elastic File System (EFS) is currently priced at $0.30 per "gigabyte-month" (GB-month) without minimum purchases or setup fees. That might sound simple, but calculating the actual AWS storage costs for EFS can be difficult.
Suppose that your EFS instance uses 100 GB for an entire 31-day month. In this case, the calculation would be straightforward at 100 GB-months: (100 GB x 31 days x 24 hours/day) / (744 hours/month). But calculations become more complicated as storage use varies throughout the month. For example, if a company used 300 GB for 15 days and only used 200 GB for the remaining 15 days of a 30-day month, the calculation for EFS pricing would look something like this:
(300 GB x 15 days x 24 hours/day) + (200 GB x 15 days x 24 hours/day)
This would be:
108,000 GB-hours + 72,000 GB-hours = 180,000 GB-hours
Then, with 720 hours in a 30-day month:
180,000 GB-hours / 720 hours/month = 250 GB-months @ $0.30/GB-month = $75 for the month.
As another example, suppose that you used 100 GB for 10 days, 150 GB for another eight days and 230 GB for the final 13 days of the 31-day month. The calculation for EFS pricing would look something like this:
(100 GB x 10 days x 24 hours/day) + (150 GB x eight days x 24 hours/day) + (230 GB x 13 days x 24 hours/day)
This would be:
24,000 GB-hours + 28,800 GB-hours + 71,760 GB-hours = 124,560 GB-hours
Then, with 744 hours in a 31-day month:
124,560 GB-hours / 744 hours/month = 167.42 GB-months @ $0.30/GB-month = $50.22 for the month
Varying daily storage use can become difficult to track manually. However, there is no hard limitation to the amount of storage capacity available for EFS. Amazon notes that EFS is designed to support petabyte-scale storage instances and support connections for thousands of concurrent sessions using the Network File System version 4 (NFS v4).
