Very happy I had the chance today to talk at re:publica on a topic I care about, how can software developers manage location-based services when dealing with disputed territories or partially recognized states: “the (accidental) developer in disputed territories“. Here are slides of my talk this afternoon, while still enjoying the party at STATION Berlin.
After going through two iterations of the AWS Certified Security – Specialty Beta, I am happy the results are finally out and I can celebrate and hold one more AWS certification.
Here are the abstract and the slides of my talk “Architectures on the cloud: from traditional deployments to serverless architectures” at the 14. Studencki Festiwal Informatyczn in Kraków this week.
Thanks Kraków for a very interesting and inspirational conference.
To celebrate 5 years after my very first AWS certification, I got today my fifth one, the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional. Thanks to Adrian Cantrill for providing the best collection of on-line resources to tackle the exam.
I am really excited (and a bit nervous already!) to attend next May re:publica, Europe’s most inspiring conference on internet and society, and talk about geolocation and disputed territories. You can read the abstract here. The (accidental) political developer is back, see you in Berlin!
According to the Amazon documentation, many users never pay for automated backups and DB Snapshots
There is no additional charge for backup storage, up to 100% of your total database storage for a region. (Based upon our experience as database administrators, the vast majority of databases require less raw storage for a backup than for the primary dataset, meaning that most customers will never pay for backup storage.)
But what if you are not one a lucky one? How do you know if you can increase the retention period of a RDS instance without ending up paying for extra storage? Or how much do you need to reduce your retention period to use only the (free) quota?
Here it gets tricky: there is no API to find out the total size of your backups or snapshots and there is nothing available in the console either.
As snapshots are incremental, it is really down to the activity of your database and it might be quite hard to predict the storage extra you are going to pay at the end of the month if you have a fixed retention or some business requirements on manual snapshots.
Sometime it might even be better to allocate more storage to the RDS instances in the region – and have access as well to higher IOPS on standard SSD storage – than simply pay for the extra storage of the snapshots.
But how can you figure out the best balance to take advantage of the free storage or forecast your backup storage? There is no direct way to find it out but you can estimate the cost – and so indirectly the size – by running a billing report.
Billing report and backup usage information
You can get a billing report from the console going to the Billing & Cost Management and:
Knowing now the cost and the AWS S3 pricing for your region, you can now determine the storage.
How can I automate the process?
You can generate and have a Hourly Cost Allocation Report delivered automatically to a S3 bucket and process the information and create your alarms and logic accordingly.
For more information see the Monthly Cost Allocation Report page
