Notes from various AWS Investigations


  • AWS CloudWatch Logs storage charge == S3 storage charge. Possibly less, since the logs are gziped level 6 first.
  • CW Logs makes more sense than using AWS Elasticsearch at small scale – prices start at 1.8c an hour + EBS charges vs 50c/GB of log ingestion + storage
  • For pure log storage & bulk retrival, S3 makes far more sense than either ElasticSearch or CloudWatch Logs. B2 is ~20% of S3 though, so they make even more sense.

  • DynamoDB streams are for watching what happens to a table, and they rotate every ~24 hours, so you’d get charged on a rolling basis, and can’t delete individual events. I’m assuming events don’t disappear once you’ve processed them.

  • Cert Manager is in more zones! But only makes a difference if you hang stuff in front of an ELB. Certs for CloudFront have to still go through us-east-1.
  • API Gateway has direct integration with DynamoDB, doing an end run around Lambda functions that just insert & retrieve records (aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/using-amazon-api-gateway-as-a-proxy-for-dynamodb/) Amusingly, models continue to not be used. (I still don’t understand what Models are supposed to do/enforce)
  • DynamoDB cross-region replication is weird. You spin up an EC2 instance that handles it for you. I wonder if the DynamoDB team will work on managed replication…
  • DynamoDB is stupid cheap, and it makes sense for me to migrate the vast majority of my DB centric stuff to it.
  • CloudFront has a weird “$0.000 per request – HTTP or HTTPS under the global monthly free tier” for requests, and I’m not sure why. My account is long out of the free tier.

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