aws-ec2-pricing

Collect AWS EC2 prices from AWS API to SQL table to analyze them.

Table of contents:

• Usage
  • download
  • build
• Installation
• Working with data
  • Table columns and meaning
  • How to run queries
• Limitations
• Future plans

Usage

Make sure AWS credentials are set as environment variables or are available otherwise to boto3 library which this program uses to connect to AWS API.

Usage: ec2pricing [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

Options:
  --version  Show the version and exit.
  --help     Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  build     Build SQLite database with prices from given JSON
  download  Download EC2 prices to JSON file

Download all "On Demand" prices for all regions for "Shared" instances into a JSON file.

ec2pricing download

Build a SQLite database from that JSON file.

You can see an example of built database in examples/prices.db file in this repo.

ec2pricing build

The resulting file is a SQLite database with a single prices table in it.

Resulting table prices in the prices.db file has following columns:

Name	Description	Examples
family	Instace family	General purpose, Compute optimized
type	Instace type group	a1, t3a, c5
size	Instace size	nano, micro, xlarge, 32xlarge
burst	Is instance burstable?	Yes, No
base	Baseline performance of CPU (%)	5, 10, 100
processor	Name of the physical CPU	AWS Graviton, AMD EPYC
bit	CPU bitness	32-bit, 64-bit
arch	CPU architecture	arm, x86
tenancy	Instance tenancy	Shared, Dedicated, Host
region	AWS Region	US East (Ohio), EU (Ireland)
vcpu	Number of virtual cores	1, 2, 32
memory	Amount of RAM	0.5 GiB, 128 GiB
storage	Storage type	EBS only, 1x60GB NVM
os	Operating System	Linux
norm	Normalization scale factor (used by AWS to compare instances)	0.5, 1.0, 8.0
speed	Declared CPU clock speed	2.5 GHz, Up to 3.2 Ghz. 0 GHz
actual	Actual CPU clock speed multiplied by baseline	0.125 GHz, 2.5 Ghz
network	Network performance	Up to 3500 MiB
gen	Is it current generation of instances?	Yes, No
cur	Price currency	USD, CNY
hourly	Hourly price	0.0255
montly	Monthly price (hourly * 24 * 30)	3.844
starting	Date from which Amazon offers this price	2021-09-01T00:00:00Z

The built database can be opened in any SQL IDE, for example, DBeaver (open source SQL editor) or in any other way. You can then run queries in it.

Show cheapest x86-64 virtual machines:

SELECT * FROM prices WHERE arch = 'x86'
 ORDER BY monthly;

Show cheapest ARM machines in Ireland:

SELECT * FROM prices
 WHERE arch = 'arm' AND region = "EU (Ireland)"
 ORDER BY monthly;

Sort all machines alpabetically by their family, type and power:

SELECT * FROM prices
 ORDER BY family, type, norm;

Limitations

Currently, downloaded prices are limited to instances with:

• "Shared" tenancy
• "Linux" operating system
• Support for VPC networking
• Only "On Demand" pricing, no reserved instances or saving plans
• "Used" capacity reservation

All these are default settings for EC2 instances when you check prices for them on AWS pricng website.

Installation

This program is written in Python and can be installed via pip.

pip install aws-ec2-pricing

Build it and run it yourself

Set up via pip and virtual environemnt

• Create a virtual environment

  python3 -m venv .venv
  source ./.venv/bin/activate
  

• Install requirements into it

  pip install -r requirements.txt
  

• Run the program

  python3 ec2pricing/__init__.py download
  

Set up via poetry

• Tell poetry which version of python available in your system to use

  poetry env use 3.9.7
  

• Install dependencies and create virtual environment

  poetry install
  

• Run program

  poetry run ec2pricing download
  

Feature plans

• Static website that displays the table along with the filters
• Add search filters as key-value pairs for initial price download
• Search for instances other than shared or Linux based
• Support saving plans, reserved instances, free tier

Copyright & License

• This program is distributed under Apache 2 License.
• All AWS and Amazon related trademarks or symbols are not mine.
• Prices obtained through this program are not an offer and should not be treated as official.