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Estimating AWS Deployment Costs

Defang enables you to estimate the cost of deploying and running your project without needing to create an account with your cloud provider. This tutorial will walk through estimating the costs of deploying the django-postgres to AWS.

Clone the sample​

defang generate       # select `django-postgres` (or any other sample) from the list
cd django-postgres    # or the name of your project's working directory

Open the compose file​

Let's take a quick look at the compose file. There are two services: db and django. Defang can generate a cost estimate of running the project described by this compose file in the cloud.

Notice that each service has a deploy.resources.reservations property which describes the service's resource requirements. These numbers will have a significant impact on the cost of running these services in the cloud. The estimation defang generates for you will be sensitive to these numbers.

services:
  db:
    restart: unless-stopped
    image: postgres:16
    x-defang-postgres: true
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_DB=django
      - POSTGRES_USER=django
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD
    ports:
      - mode: host
        target: 5432
        published: 5432
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "python3", "-c", "import sys, urllib.request; urllib.request.urlopen(sys.argv[1]).read()", "http://localhost:8000/"]
    deploy:
      resources:
        reservations:
          cpus: '0.5'
          memory: 256M

  django:
    restart: unless-stopped
    build: ./app
    ports:
      - mode: ingress
        target: 8000
        published: 8000
    environment:
      - DB_HOST=db
      - DEBUG=False
      - POSTGRES_USER=django
      - POSTGRES_DB=django
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD
      - SECRET_KEY
      - ALLOWED_HOSTS
    depends_on:
      - db
    deploy:
      resources:
        reservations:
          cpus: '0.5'
          memory: 256M

Generate an estimate​

Generating an estimate is easy. All you need to do is run

defang estimate

Defang can deploy a project according to different deployment modes. By default, defang will estimate the cost deploying with the affordable mode. If you would like to increase your application's resiliency, you can deploy will the balanced or high_availability modes. Defang can estimate the cost of deploying using any of these modes.

defang estimate --provider aws [--mode affordable|balanced|high_availability]

Here is an example of the output you would see if you estimated the cost deploying the django-postgres sample using the balanced deployment mode.

defang estimate --provider=aws --mode=balanced
 * Packaging the project files for django at /Users/defang/samples/samples/django-postgres/app
 * Generating deployment preview
 * Preparing estimate

Estimate for Deployment Mode: BALANCED

This mode strikes a balance between cost and availability. Your application
will be deployed with spot instances. Databases will be provisioned using
resources optimized for production. Services in the "internal" network will
be deployed to a private subnet with a NAT gateway for outbound internet access.

Cost    Quantity           Service   Description
$16.43  730 Hours          (shared)  AWSELB USW2-LoadBalancerUsage
$32.85  730 Hours          (shared)  AmazonEC2 USW2-NatGateway-Hours
$25.00  100 %Utilized/mo   db        AmazonRDS USW2-InstanceUsage:db.r5.large
$1.62   14600 GB-Hours     django    AmazonECS USW2-Fargate-EphemeralStorage-GB-Hours (20 GB * 730 hours)
$1.62   365 GB-Hours       django    AmazonECS USW2-Fargate-GB-Hours (0.50 GB * 730 hours)
-$1.14  365 GB-Hours       django    AmazonECS USW2-Fargate-GB-Hours-SpotDiscount (Estimated @ 70%)
$7.39   182.50 vCPU-Hours  django    AmazonECS USW2-Fargate-vCPU-Hours:perCPU (0.25 vCPU * 730 hours)
-$5.17  182.50 vCPU-Hours  django    AmazonECS USW2-Fargate-vCPU-Hours:perCPU-SpotDiscount (Estimated @ 70%)
Estimated Monthly Cost: $78.60 (+ usage)

Estimate does not include taxes or Discount Programs.
To estimate other modes, use defang estimate --mode=affordable|balanced|high_availability
For help with warnings, check our FAQ at https://s.defang.io/warnings

This estimate will include a line item for the most significant monthly costs associated with your deployment. Each line item will be associated with a compose service if possible. Some AWS resources will be shared between multiple compose services.

Deploying your project​

Now that you have estimated the costs associated with your project. You are ready to deploy to AWS.

defang compose up --provider aws --mode affordable|balanced|high_availability