I spend a lot of time putting together AWS Cost Calculators, and as it’s been a while since I’ve made a post, I thought I’d show off a neat little extension for Chrome that I put together.
The AWS Simple Cost Calculator – https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html – is a great tool for putting together the cost of AWS Resources. Probably the biggest use of these would be for putting together EC2 Instances and EBS Volumes. For the AWS Uninitiated, these are the equivalent of a Virtual Machine and associated disks.
It lets you add in multiple EC2 Instances and EBS Volumes, which gives you an estimated cost for running those instances. Obviously, you can add other things into the cost calculator (such as S3 Storage, ElastiCache, Route 53, etc), but in all honesty most people use the EC2 and EBS Volumes sections.
For example, let’s assume I wanted to run a Windows Server 2012R2 EC2 Instance in AWS, in the Sydney region, and I wanted to know how much it cost – I’d add in the instance, pick the volume size, which would tell me how much it costs per month to run. For example, I’ve linked this cost calculator here:
Let’s say you put together a large Cost Calculator for a customer or your own environment. You may want to take those costs, put them into a spreadsheet for calculation, or even a word document for a proposal that you’re putting together, but you can’t figure out how – there’s no way to export it!
Traditionally, you’d have to copy and paste each field into a spreadsheet or table, and that sucks.
As the old saying goes – a lazy engineer is a good engineer (when they automate, not when they cut corners). So, I present to you the AWS Cost Calculator CSV Converter. It costs a buck, and it’s super super handy for converting large Cost Calculations into a CSV document. You can get it from here:
Let’s assume that I’ve run my Chrome extension over the cost calculator I’ve linked above. You’d end up with two CSV Files – Instances an Volumes, and they look like this:
Awesome, yes?
Laziness for the win!