Investigating regions - March 2023

Data valid on the 4 March 2023

Intro

Regions are important for AWS pricing as each region has a price list; the same product in different regions can (and often does) have a different price.

Finding some ways to compare prices per region

S3 is, with EC2, one of the oldest (mature) services of AWS. One Gigabyte of S3 storage is delivered in the say way in any region. I assume that differences in price between regions are due to the regions’ specific factors, for example real-estate prices, energy costs, and probably taxes.

Now that I think I found a good the unit of measure, let’s see how much the price changes per region.

It seems that multiple regions have exacly the same price, as if there were buckets of regions. Let’s see if this grouping is the same when using the price of one hour of t3.micro (one of the simplest instance type, available everywhere).

No! The prices are distributed differently.

I am surprise by GovCloud East 1 (and 2). It is one of the costliest region for storage, but kind of average for t3.micro; maybe because in GovCloud the data needs higher levels of admin and protection over what is normally available in the commercial cloud, while running a VM does not have such overhead.

Not all regions are created equal (in term of services)

The other important topic about regions is that not every region has every service, some regions have more services than other.

Are there regions with all the services?

None, us-east-1 does not have it all!

My assumption that us-east-1 has everything is proven wrong. Based on the pricing data, us-east-1 does not have:

• Device Farm
• Ground Station
• IoT 1-click
• Honeycode

Services available in all regions

• Certificate Manager
• CloudFormation
• CloudTrail
• CodeDeploy
• Config
• Database Migration service…strange
• Events
• Lambda. It feels like AWS is using old EC2 hardware for Lambda
• SQS
• Secret Manager
• System Manager
• X-ray (!!!)
• API Gateway
• CloudWatch
• DynamoDB
• EC2
  • Data Transfer (obvious)
  • ELB
  • VPC
• Elastic Container Registry - ECR
• ECF, what is that?
• EFS
• ES (Elastic Search I guess)
• ElastiCache
• Kinesis
• RDS
• RedShift
• S3, including Glacier Deep Archive
• SNS
• SWF
• States
• Elastic Map Reduce (that’s a surprise)
• KMS

Sustainability

The third important element is how green is a datacentre? Unfortunatly the data is not easily available, but I will search and see how to include being green as part of this page.

Investigating services - March 2023

Intro

Services are many. And this analysis will not match exalty what you see in the AWS console. Some services of AWS are free, so not in the pricing. Others are a subpart of a service, yet shown as a individual service, like VPC, LB and other services under EC2.

How many services are they?

And does the data and website are a match?

As of today (2023-03-09) the AWS website lists 238 services.

At the same time, the list of services listed in the pricing data shows 202 services. 36 services are missing from the pricing data. It seems that some services ‘in preview’ do not have a pricing file. Services that are really a grouping of tools, like mainframe migration and Well Architected tool, also miss pricing.

Which service run in which region?

There is a lot of white in the graph, more than I expected. Many services are available only in one region! How can that be possible, I expect AWS to have disaster recovery for each service, even the one running in a single region. My guess (another one) is that if, for example, CostExplorer starts to fail in us-east-1, it would automatically replicate in another region, and maybe the price list would be updated too.