Total Billing Estimates: The total cost of running your Microsoft SharePoint deployment on AWS will vary depending on your needs and configuration. After following the implementation guide, you can run your SharePoint farm for as long or as little time as you would like. If you run it for a day, your AWS charges will be less than $12/hour or $300/day. If you’d like to run your SharePoint farm for a month, you can expect to be charged $8,700 per month, which would save you an average of 40% over a similar on-premises SharePoint deployment.
You can explore the AWS Pricing Calculator to evaluate alternate configurations to meet your needs and budget. For in-depth guidance on cost optimization, read the whitepaper on Estimating AWS Deployment Costs for Microsoft SharePoint Server.
SharePoint Licensing: By default, this guide installs the evaluation edition of SharePoint Server 2016 and SQL Server provided by Microsoft, which is most appropriate for a trial or proof-of-concept project. For production environments, you can license SharePoint Server and SQL Server through the Microsoft License Mobility through Software Assurance program, and use your own product key during deployment. For development and test environments, see MSDN on AWS.
AWS Service usage and cost: AWS pricing is based on your usage of each individual service. The total combined usage of each service will create your monthly bill. Explore the tabs below to learn what each service does and how it affects your bill.
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Amazon S3
Description: Amazon S3 provides secure, durable, and highly-scalable cloud storage for objects like SharePoint installation media. Amazon S3 makes it easy to use cloud storage with a simple web interface to store and retrieve data from anywhere on the web, meaning that SharePoint will be reliably available to your users.
How Pricing Works: Amazon S3 Pricing is based on five types of usage: the type of Amazon S3 storage you use, where you store your content (e.g. US East vs. Asia Pacific - Sydney), the amount you store, the number of requests you or your users make to store new content or retrieve the content, and the amount of data that is transferred from Amazon S3 to you or your users. For more information, see Amazon S3 pricing.
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Amazon EC2
Description: The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) service enables you to launch virtual machine instances with a variety of operating systems. You can choose from existing Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) or import your own virtual machine images. Amazon EC2 provides the compute power that runs your SharePoint Server, SQL Server, or Windows Server applications.
How Pricing Works: Amazon EC2 pricing is based on four components: the instance type you choose (EC2 comes in 40+ types of instances with options optimized for compute, memory, storage and more), the region your instances are based in, the software you run, and the pricing model you select (on-demand instances, reserved capacity, spot, etc.). For more information, see Amazon EC2 pricing.
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Amazon VPC
Description: The Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) service lets you provision a private, isolated section of the AWS cloud where you can launch AWS services and other resources in a virtual network that you define. You have complete control over your virtual networking environment, including selection of your own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways. For critical application workloads like Microsoft SharePoint, you should deploy a VPC across multiple AWS availability zones to ensure both a highly secure and highly available deployment.
How Pricing Works: If you choose to create a Hardware VPN Connection to your VPC using a Virtual Private Gateway, you are charged for each "VPN Connection-hour" that your VPN connection is provisioned and available. Each partial VPN Connection-hour consumed is billed as a full hour. You also incur standard AWS data transfer charges for all data transferred via the VPN Connection. If you no longer wish to be charged for a VPN Connection, you simply terminate your VPN Connection using the AWS Management Console, commandline interface, or API. For more information, see Amazon VPC pricing.
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AWS CloudFormation
Description: AWS CloudFormation gives you an easy way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, and provision and update them in an orderly and predictable way. You use a template to describe all the AWS resources (e.g., Amazon EC2 instances) that you want. You don't have to individually create and configure the resources or figure out dependencies—AWS CloudFormation handles all of that. In this project, AWS Cloud Formation will automatically deploy the AWS resources and install key Microsoft software such as Microsoft SQL Server, SharePoint Server and Windows Server instances.
How Pricing Works: There is no additional charge for AWS CloudFormation. You pay for AWS resources (such as Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing load balancers, etc.) created using AWS CloudFormation in the same manner as if you created them manually. You only pay for what you use, as you use it; there are no minimum fees and no required upfront commitments.
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AWS IAM
Description: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) enables you to securely control access to AWS services and resources for your users. With IAM, you can manage users, security credentials such as access keys, and permissions that control which AWS resources users can access, from a central location. AWS IAM includes integration with Microsoft Active Directory so your existing IAM solution can be easily extended to AWS cloud resources.
How Pricing Works: AWS Identity and Access Management is a feature of your AWS account offered for free.
