Save AWS-cost on CloudFront

AWS Pricing Cloud Computing

Anders Bjørnestad

AWS Authorized Instructor

AWS have again announced a form of price reduction on one of their services (or actually multiple services). This time based on an old service, Amazon CloudFront, and this is through a savings plan.


As most savings plans in AWS you would need to commit to a year, and think about your future use. In this case it is probably easy to look at historical data and use that as a basis.

 

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CloudFront Security Savings Bundle


The CloudFront Security Savings Bundle is a flexible self-service pricing plan that helps you save up to 30% on your CloudFront bill in exchange for a monthly spend commitment for a 1 year term. This savings is not limited to data delivered by CloudFront, but applies to all CloudFront usage types including Lambda@Edge. The CloudFront Security Savings Bundle also includes free AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) usage up to 10% of your committed amount.

 

Since this plan also cover transfer-cost, you will get an even greater benefit of sending your traffic through CloudFront and not directly to your ALBs, EC2s or S3-bukcets.

 

You will find the tool in the CloudFront section of the AWS console (not in the billing/cost-section!) As always there are things to look into before you commit here — read the docs and the FAQ!

 

Recommendations for suggested savings

AWS is giving you a recommendations for suggested savings, but it does not look like it grabs all the data (correct?) which might lead to a low recommendation than you would need. What I have seen is that the first month looks like it is missing cost compared to the bill (November), and our WAF charges are not reflected either. We are steady on ≈USD20 (ex vat) on CloudFront spend so I was expecting a higher recommendation. In this case we are using WAF Classic, which might be a reason for WAF charges showing as $0.00 (not been able to get it confirmed yet)


Below you can see the suggestion and the actual cost from Cost Explorer.

 

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CloudFront and WAF usage


Savings calculator

There is a calculator in the savings tool, where you enter the expected size in GB pr month and average size of the requests. Be aware that you are paying for the requests going through CloudFront so you would need to enter the average size carefully as it is used to calculate the number of requests. If you set the object-size to large, your cost will likely be too low.

 

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Calculator


Other things to have in mind

  • The savings are given as credits on your account, applied only to the relevant services. If you are using credit-sharing or are doing analysis on your billing-data you might have to look into this up front.

  • Managed WAF rules subscribed through the AWS Marketplace are not covered by the CloudFront Security Savings Bundle.

  • This feature is not (yet) available through any API/CLI (console only)

  • It is located in the CloudFront console, and not in the billing-part of the console like the other savings-plan.

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