How much does AWS at Emory cost?

The cost of AWS at Emory account is based on Amazon’s ‘pay-as-you-go’ model. This means, the cost varies based on the services utilized by the account. There are two sets of discounts that are available to Emory users: an Enterprise Discount Plan and AWS Savings Plan.

The Enterprise Discount Plan (EDP for short) was signed in September 2020 between Emory and AWS. Under this five-year agreement, Emory has committed to a level of organizational spending across all services in the accounts under Emory’s primary account. Under this agreement, investigators enjoy a fixed rate of 6% discount on almost all services including EC2, EBS, S3, RDS and more.

The AWS Savings Plans basically operates by committing to a certain level of compute (EC2 and Lambda) aggregated across the AWS accounts under our Emory AWS primary account. These accounts can have significant savings over on-demand compute pricing. The actual amount is determined by a few parameters including the type of EC2 and the timing of use. You do not have to do anything to receive the benefit of the Savings Plan. OIT has pre-committed for the institution, and the net impact to many of your EC2 instances will be an additional 25-30% reduction in cost for on-demand usage.

This AWS Pricing Calculator helps estimate the costs of the services based on the usage with the AWS published rate before the two set of discounts. You can reach us at aws.help@emory.edu for help with cost estimation.

All AWS at Emory accounts have CloudTrail logging and Guard Duty  enabled on their accounts. These features help with the threat detection and continuous monitoring and protection of your workloads. OIT will cover the GuardDuty charges incurred on the account. Any additional CloudTrail you add at the account level is the account owner's responsibility. However the account owners have an option to disable CloudTrail logging or enable it at the account level, but it should not be necessary.

You may notice Guard Duty and VPN Charges in your bill for a given month. These charges will be credited back to your account in the same month.

In addition to the cost of usage of the AWS services, Amazon also charges a Data Egress fee (Outbound Data Transfer fee) for the amount of data moving out of the cloud. This fee is waived for all AWS at Emory Accounts by AWS and the rebate appears in Compass in the following month.