AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery pricing

AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS) has simple, predictable, usage-based pricing. With AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, you pay only for the servers you are actively replicating to AWS. Your costs are based on a flat per hour fee. There are no resources to manage, no upfront costs, and no minimum fee. This gives you the flexibility to easily use our recovery solution by paying on an hourly basis, rather than committing to a long-term contract or set number of servers.

Pricing includes continuous data replication, test launches, recovery launches, and point-in-time recovery.

Replicating your source servers to AWS using AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery consumes additional resources on your AWS account, mostly storage (Amazon EBS), and compute (Amazon EC2). These are consumed during ongoing data replication, and when you launch drill or recovery instances. Charges for each service are billed to your AWS account according to your pricing plan.

If you are using AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery for production workloads, AWS Business or Enterprise Support is recommended.

Pricing example #1: Monthly AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery replication of 100 on-premises servers

Assume you use AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS) to replicate 100 on-premises servers running business-critical applications for an average month (730 hours). Assume these servers have a total of 200 disks, totaling 30TB, and that the combined average change rate on these disks is 3.3% per day.

Your monthly cost will be composed of the charge for AWS DRS, as well as the additional AWS resources that AWS DRS uses to maintain ongoing replication and to enable drill or recovery launches, as described below.

AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery
AWS DRS is billed hourly, per replicating server. The cost is the same, regardless of the number of disks, size of storage, number of drill or recovery launches, or the Region to which you are replicating.

Total monthly AWS DRS charge: 100 servers * $0.028 per server per hour * 730 hours = $2,044.00

EBS volumes
For each disk you have at the source, AWS DRS creates an equally sized EBS volume, called a “staging disk,” for ongoing replication. Assume that 50% of your storage requires higher performance gp3 EBS volumes, and the remainder can use low-cost sc1 EBS volumes.

Total monthly EBS volume costs: $1,425.00

This total consists of:
gp3: 0.08 (GB month) * 15TB = $1,200.00
sc1: 0.015 (GB month) * 15TB = $225.00

Example pricing is based on the US-East (N. Virginia) Region. Please refer to the EBS Pricing page for the most-up-to-date EBS volume pricing information.

EBS snapshots
AWS DRS uses one base snapshot for each source disk, which is equivalent in size to that disk. In addition, AWS DRS saves incremental snapshots for point in time recovery. The number of days you select for your snapshot retention period will also affect the number of incremental EBS snapshots that are saved to your AWS account.

The following total assumes the default 7-day retention policy.

Total monthly EBS snapshot costs: $0.05 (GB month) * [30TB (base) + [30TB * 3.3% (daily change rate) * 7 days]] = $1,846.50

Example pricing is based on the US-East (N. Virginia) Region. Please refer to the EBS Pricing page for the most-up-to-date EBS snapshot pricing information.

EC2 Instances
AWS DRS uses EC2 instances as Replication Servers, which facilitate ongoing data replication. By default, these are low-cost t3.small EC2 instances. Each Replication Server can handle replication of disks from multiple source servers, with a maximum of 15 staging disks. For some high write rate source servers, you may choose to use more performant instance types as Replication Servers. Replication Servers are launched and terminated by AWS DRS automatically, as needed.

Assume that 17 Replication Servers are required to replicate your 200 source disks. Of these, 14 are t3.small instances, and three are m5.2xlarge instances.

Total monthly EC2 costs: [14 (t3.small instances) * $0.0208 (per hour)] + [3 (m5.2xlarge instances) * $0.384 (per hour)] = $1.5056 * 730 (hours in average month) = $1,053.54

Example pricing is based on On-Demand Instances replicating to the US-East (N. Virginia) Region. Please refer to the EC2 Pricing page for the most-up-to-date EC2 pricing information.

Total monthly cost = $6,389.03

Pricing example #2: Launch recovery instances on AWS for an 8-hour DR drill

Assume you are replicating the same 100 servers in Example 1, and you run a DR drill during which you launch recovery instances for all of your 100 replicating servers. Assume your servers remain launched on AWS for 8 hours. Costs for your fully provisioned servers are incurred only during drills and recovery.

EBS volumes
Assume you have 30TB total EBS storage.  When you launch recovery instances for your DR drill, assume that 90% (27TB) of storage is on gp3 EBS volume types, and 10% of storage is io2 EBS volume types with 1,000 IOPS.

Total EBS cost for 8-hour DR drill: $28.49

This total consists of:
gp3: 0.08 (GB month) * 27TB / 730 (hours per month) * 8 hours = $23.67
io2: 0.125 (GB month) * 3TB / 730 (hours per month) * 8 hours = $4.10
IOPS (io2): $0.065 (IOPS-month) * 1,000 IOPS * 28,800 seconds / (3,600 seconds/hour * 730 hours per month) = $0.71

EC2 instances
Of the 100 instances you launch for the drill, assume that 60 are configured to launch as low-cost t3.small EC2 instances, 30 are mid-range m5.large, and 10 are m5.4xlarge.

Total EC2 cost for 8-hour DR drill: $94.46

This total consists of:
t3.small: 60 instances * $0.0208 per hour * 8 hours = $9.98
m5.large: 30 instances * $0.0960 per hour * 8 hours = $23.04
m5.4xlarge: 10 instances * $0.7680 per hour * 8 hours = $61.44

Total cost for an 8-hour DR drill for 100 servers = $122.94

Costs not included in this example:

• Conversion Servers. For each recovery instance launched, AWS DRS also launches a Conversion Server EC2 instance, which runs for several minutes. The cost of each Conversion Server is generally less than $0.05 per launched recovery instance.
• Data transfer costs. The amount of data transferred during a DR drill, and where it is transferred to (within the Region, through the internet, etc.), can vary greatly. These costs are typically insignificant compared to the costs described in this example. Learn more about data transfer costs.