Cost Estimation provides the administrator feedback on estimates of AWS infrastructure costs for the backup operations of a policy. This shows granular information on how much cost running the policy will incur, with an option to export to CSV or XML. Included in the cost estimation is the following information:

• Snapshot Costs – costs for EBS snapshots
• Backup Costs – costs for S3 storage and worker operations
• Traffic Costs – costs for network transfers. These typically represent out of region or out of AWS networking charges
• Transaction Costs – S3 request and data retrievals charges
• Total Costs

Based on Instances included in a policy, and settings and schedules, Cost Estimation provides infrastructure cost estimates for the policy operation.
The calculations are based on:

• Sizes of the instances
• The location of the destination of the policy:
  • Snapshots
  • Backups (region of S3 bucket for storing backups)
• Built in constants for:
  • Change rates daily (3% daily)
  • % of total Instance capacity that is in use (70% of provisioned size)
• Schedule for the instance
• Types of storage consumed by the instance snapshots, and backups
• Calculations are done based on the policy running regularly and becoming ‘mature’ in that retention operations are being performed

When optimizing costs some things to understand:

Are there unexpected network traffic charges due to out of region or out of AWS data transfers?
Adjusting policy setting for repository selection may help reduce these costs. For example selecting a repository that is in the same region as the source Instances being backed up by the policy

Are there high Snapshot charges?
Adjusting the snapshot retention may help reduce these charges

Overall frequency of backups?
More frequent policy scheduling can raise infrastructure costs for the policy.

Cost estimation does not estimate restore costs.