Estimating the charges for Amazon RDS Extended Support

“Premature optimization is the root of all evil”, is a quote from David Knuth’s: The Art of Computer Programming. This famous quote often guides the priorities of software engineers and it is truly inspirational wisdom. However, when it comes to Cloud Financial Management (CFM), improvement is an ongoing journey and it’s never too early to look around corners.

For CFM practitioners, you have the opportunity to not only provide reporting and analytics about your company’s cloud footprint, but you can also lean into thought leadership. By being involved with deployment decisions that drive resiliency, you can help align the mechanisms that are coherent with the vision of the company’s financial goals.

Today, we take you through the calculations for estimating your company’s spend on Amazon RDS Extended Support. We share prescriptive guidance to very quickly engage with your engineering teams.

What is Amazon RDS Extended Support

In September 2023, we announced Amazon RDS Extended Support which is now available for specific engine versions of Amazon Aurora MySQL, Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon RDS for MySQL, and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. This allows you to continue running your database on one of the supported major engine versions past its end of standard support date at an additional charge. With this paid feature, you will have up to three years beyond community end of life to upgrade, migrate, and transform your database to match your business requirements. This gives you flexibility on version upgrades, while still receiving security fixes from AWS. The additional time allows you to change your application and reduces the potential impact of community engine security and stability issues from older versions that have not been patched.

To see if Amazon RDS Extended Support is available for the major version of your database:

How are the charges calculated

The charges for Amazon RDS Extended Support varies per region and is a per vCPU per hour charge (number of vCPU * number of hours).

For example, an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database running on a db.r5.large instance in the US West (Oregon) region has 2 vCPUs. (See DB instance classes to determine the number of vCPUs ). In order to calculate the charges, navigate to the Amazon RDS Extended Support pricing page (see the Current Pricing below) for the respective database to determine the vCPU per hour pricing for both the first two years, and then the pricing for the third year.

In this case the first year charge is $ .100 per vCPU hour * 365 days * 24 hours * 2 vCPUs = $1,752. The second year charge is identical to the first at $1,752. For the third year, $ .200 * 365 * 24 * 2 = $3,504. The total of three years is $7,008 for all three years.

This example assumes that the database was not upgraded during the time frame. The number of hours are calculated on running 24/7 during the entire year, and this is a single AZ configuration.

You can also use the AWS Pricing Calculator to create an estimate.

Current Pricing

For Amazon RDS Extended Support current pricing, see the AWS website for your respective database, which is the best source for accurate pricing.

What about Clusters

Charges for Amazon RDS Extended Support includes all replicas as well as all standby instances in Multi-AZ and Multi-AZ DB cluster configurations. You will need to calculate the total number of vCPUs used for your cluster to estimate the charges.

What about Snapshots

There is no charge for DB snapshots. However, if your instance version qualifies for automated enrollment into Amazon RDS Extended Support, you will be charged from the time you restore the DB snapshot until you have upgraded to an engine major version under standard support.

What about Billing

Amazon RDS Extended Support will be a separate sku/line item on your bill. i.e. you will pay for Amazon RDS Extended Support in addition to your database/storage/backup charges. RI discounts do not apply to Amazon RDS Extended Support, though your unique custom discounted terms may apply (please confirm with your account teams). Extended Support will be charged for all instances (primary, reader, multi az etc).

Amazon RDS Extended Support Usage Type is now available in AWS Cost Explorer. To find the relevant charges, under Usage Type filters in Cost Explorer, search for ‘ExtendedSupport’, as seen below.

Figure 1. Screenshot of Usage Type filter “ExtendedSupport” in AWS Cost Explorer

Sample Script to Estimate the Charges for Amazon RDS Extended Support

To assist customers in calculating the charges for Amazon RDS Extended Support in their AWS accounts, we are providing a sample script. Using this solution, you can get the latest pricing data programmatically, get a list of your Amazon RDS Extended Support eligible databases, and the estimated charge for Year 1, 2 & 3 of staying on Extended Support. You can obtain this information across all regions and run it for a single account, a list of accounts or their entire organization. To allow the script to run across your organization, you will need to create an IAM role, which will be assumed by the script to retrieve the list of Amazon RDS instances in your accounts. The Github README provides instructions to create this role using a CloudFormation StackSet. The script outputs a CSV file which lists all the eligible Amazon RDS instances only and the estimated Amazon RDS Extended Support charges for the 3 year span.

To get started, please follow the instructions on the following Github link:

Amazon RDS Extended Support Calculator – https://github.com/aws-samples/rds-extended-support-cost-estimator

Conclusion

From this blog, you have seen how upgrade decisions have an impact on charges and the intersection of engineering and finance provides an opportunity to influence your organization.

For additional guidance, you can also login to the console and ask Amazon Q questions regarding AWS Services and Documentation. You can also search AWS re:Post, AWS Blogs, and review the links below.

AWS Cloud Financial Management