How much does it cost to run the Gruntwork Reference Architecture in AWS per month?

[zackproser]

A customer asked:

Can you give me a ballpark estimate for how much it costs to run the Reference Architecture?

[zackproser]

The cost depends on the number of environments you configure, which infra you pick (e.g., EKS vs EKS Fargate) and a bunch of other factors. That said, the default config is around $3,000 per month.

It adds about another $1,000 per month if you have CIS enabled due to the cost of running the all-region configurations (such as Config).

After your Ref Arch has been deployed, If you're looking to destroy certain resources in order to save on costs, we have the following recommendations:

1. Configure AWS Budgets in your accounts to monitor and project your monthly spend. You can use AWS Budgets to set up thresholds and alerts for when you are projected to exceed your stated budget.
2. If you do not need all three app accounts (Dev, Stage, Prod), then consider terminating one of your environments by destroying all the resources in it. Ideally, you'd use Gruntwork Pipelines to do this, by deleting the env folder corresponding to the environment you want to terminate. You could also use terragrunt run-all destroy from within the correct env folder.
3. In our analysis, some of the heavy hitters in terms of adding costs to your overall bill are: RDS, ElastiCache, the Recording functionality in AWS Config, App clusters and services, and NAT gateways. You can start by examining these resources and seeing if you could re-configure, downsize or delete any of these resources.