AWS Backup DynamoDB billing

0

Hi everyone! I'd like to understand better the billing composition regardless of AWS Backup on DynamoDB resources since I got an unexpected increase in my billing.

I'm aware of AWS Backup billing itself thanks to the documentation, anyway, when I access the Billing service I can notice an exponential billing pricing in DynamoDB service, on the section Amazon DynamoDB USE1-TimedBackupStorage-ByteHrs the description allows me to see that I'll be paying $0.10 per GB-month of storage used for on-demand backup, showing me that I've used 14,247.295 GB-Month (This makes sense with the billing I got) but where my doubt comes from is, where does all those GB come from? The last snapshot-size just shows 175.5 GB

I've configured my backup plan with the following parameters:

{
    "ruleName": "hourly-basis",
    "scheduleExpression": "cron(0 * ? * * *)",
    "startWindowMinutes": 60,
    "completionWindowMinutes": 180,
    "lifecycle": {
        "toDeletedAfterDays": 30
    }
}

I'm also copying snapshots into a second region on us-west-2

As you can see, I'm handling a schedule expression on an hourly basis backup because of compliance requirements. Is this enough justification for the high billing? I'm aware that backups with low RPO are commonly expensive but I just want to be sure that this billing is not higher than it should be because of any wrong Backup configuration.

Thanks in advance!

1 Answer
1

Hello,

I understand that you need further information regarding the increase in your billing.

The reason for the increase in your bill is because you are handling 175GB hourly snapshots for an entire month which is approximately 126,000GB per month: 24 hours x 30 days x 175GB = 126,000GB-month of snapshots.

Please refer to this documentation and scroll down to "Working example" for more details on how billing works: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/storage/automating-backups-and-optimizing-backup-costs-for-amazon-efs-using-aws-backup/

Another cause for high billing is that AWS Backup does not support DynamoDB incremental snapshots. Please refer to this documentation for additional information: https://aws.amazon.com/backup/features/#Incremental_backups

Recommendations:

  1. One recommended way to reduce billing costs is to either reduce the backup schedule or the amount of time the backup is stored for.

  2. Another thing that could be done is relying on DynamoDB PITR and using AWS Backup for weekly/monthly snapshots. You can also use PITR (point-in-time-recovery) with hourly, daily, and weekly backups for more compliance. Please refer to this documentation for further information on PITR for Amazon DynamoDB: https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/pitr/

Please contact AWS Support if you have any further questions, and feel free to reach out to us via a support case ticket to facilitate a discussion on the specifics of your resources: https://console.aws.amazon.com/support/home#/case/create?issueType=technical

Maria_E
answered 2 years ago
AWS
SUPPORT ENGINEER
reviewed 2 years ago

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