After my post AWS Elasticache’s Deceptive Billing Practices one of my readers asked about Serverless Redshift so let’s dig into that quick. (Thanks Abhijith!)

Disclaimer: I don’t currently have a project that needs serverless Redshift so I have NOT booted it up and seen how they bill it on one of my own AWS accounts. I am just diving through the docs for now. Once you see how much the base price for this is per month you will understand why.

Fixed Cost:

Based on what I see on their Pricing Page they say $3 per hour and pay only for the compute capacity your data warehouse consumes when it is active

Based on that $3 an hour times 24 hours times 30 days is $2,160 per month roughly. So there is a fixed cost of $2,160 per month not including the variable costs.

Variable Costs:

Compute is billed out at $0.375 per RPU hour which is high but considering it is a data warehouse and not a redis cache or standard DB your users would be querying frequently that is not completely crazy.

One thing they play down is the storage costs, any data store will have storage costs. After reading a bit further they don’t explicitly tell you the costs but they do say “Storage is billed at the same rates as with Amazon Redshift provisioned clusters”. Now I couldn’t find a section on “Amazon Redshift provisioned clusters” but I did find one called “Amazon Redshift managed storage pricing” which might or might not be what they are talking about. If that is the case we are talking about $0.024 per GB of data stored in the warehouse. Actually not that bad. AWS S3’s standard tier is $0.023 per GB so it is pretty close. Again that is assuming the numbers I pulled from are the section they referenced.

Finally don’t forget the data transfer costs of $0.02 per GB which will add up over time.

Conclusion:

This might be a viable solution but these serverless datastores all come with hidden fixed costs that kind of defeat the purpose of using them for small projects.

~Cheers

PS: If you are interested in engaging my services as a Web Application Architect check out my Group Coaching Program or 1 on 1 Consulting at schematical.com and check out my FREE eBook 20 Things You Can DoTo Save Money On Your Amazon Web Services Bill Today