Inquiry About Costs for Workload Discovery on AWS

Thank you for your inquiry about Workload Discovery on AWS. I'll address your questions in order:

1. Yes, deployment is necessary to use Workload Discovery on AWS, even if you only want to create architecture diagrams. This solution is designed to automatically generate and maintain architecture diagrams based on your actual AWS resources, so it needs to be deployed in your AWS environment to function.

2. Regarding the costs associated with deployment, there are two main deployment options:

   • Single instance deployment: This costs approximately $425.19 per month in the US East (N. Virginia) Region. This option includes an Amazon Neptune instance, an Amazon OpenSearch Service instance, Amazon VPC (NAT Gateway), AWS Config, and Amazon ECS (AWS Fargate Task).

   • Multiple instances deployment: This costs approximately $772.67 per month in the US East (N. Virginia) Region. This option includes two instances each of Amazon Neptune and Amazon OpenSearch Service in two Availability Zones, along with the other services mentioned in the single instance deployment.

   These costs are based on the services used by the solution, which are billed on a monthly basis. The exact cost may vary depending on your usage and the AWS Region you deploy in.

3. While Workload Discovery on AWS is a paid solution, AWS does offer some free options for creating architecture diagrams:

   • AWS CloudFormation Designer: This is a graphic tool for creating, viewing, and modifying AWS CloudFormation templates. It's free to use and can help you visualize your infrastructure.

   • AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code: This includes a feature called "AWS Explorer" that can help you visualize your AWS resources.

   • AWS Console: While not specifically for creating diagrams, you can view visual representations of some services (like VPC) in the AWS Management Console.

However, these free options typically don't offer the same level of automatic discovery and relationship mapping as Workload Discovery on AWS. They are more suited for manual creation or viewing of specific resource configurations.

Remember that while Workload Discovery on AWS does incur costs, it provides value through time savings, improved documentation, and the ability to easily visualize and understand complex AWS environments.
Sources
Cost - Workload Discovery on AWS
Deploy a visualization tool that automatically generates architecture diagrams of AWS Cloud workloads - Workload Discovery on AWS
Use cases - Workload Discovery on AWS