amazon web services - beanstalk pricing decisions

Question

Looking at this page http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/ I get a little bit confused when reading the pricing section.

The pricing section mentions both S3 storage as well as elastic block store volume and I do not understand why. Both the S3 and the EBS services seem to me to be data storage services and therefore what sense does it make to buy both?

What I need is a web server to deploy a PHP platform and a separate database server to deploy a MySQL database linked to the platform. The web server requires disk space to hold the actual code of the website and the website is not expected to have the need of a lot of hard disk space since the users will not upload or download a lot of content. Most content will be generated on the fly from the database while the users navigate in the platform that I develop.

The database server will hold a considerably sized database. Again, for that reason, I believe I require the Amazon RDS service and such service is not listed in the pricing section of the above link. My question here also is: if I buy the RDS server for the relational database, will I still need S3 or EBS or both to store the database data itself? I don't understand this...

Hope you can help me...

Thanks

Answer 1

S3 is used to store the source copy of your application version, so that if you need to scale-up, the new EC2 instance pulls a copy from S3. The cost for this is generally negligible.

You can use EBS, but you don't have to use EBS. EBS is on-instance storage, and is much faster than connecting to S3 if that sort of thing is important. EBS is also persistent storage, as opposed to ephemeral which goes away when the instance shuts down or is replaced.

Think of EBS as a hot-swappable hard drive that you can pull from one instance and pop into another that still has all of the data on it. This isn't as important for your application code (which is copied from S3 when a new instance is added to the environment), but may be important for other "hot" parts of your application. If you don't need this, then so be it.

RDS is its own thing. There's support for doing snapshots and/or regular backups of your data to S3/EBS (I don't recall which at the moment), but neither are strictly required for the day-to-day nature of RDS. Keeping regular backups of your database is highly recommended (for your own sake), but not required.

Make sense?

Answer 2

RDS is a separate service from Elastic Beanstalk and EC2/EBS and S3. Think of it as its own independent service.

The storage for an RDS DB is priced and billed separately from any other S3 or EBS usage. The storage used by snapshots is also priced separately, along with the RDS pricing.