Amazon Cloud VPC, where to start or what are the alternatives? How to calculate the cost?

Question

Amazon Web Services

It is necessary to organize a system of two or three web servers with a load balancer, two replicated databases to them and also file storage, all this should communicate over its internal network, only the gateway / balancer should look outside. Management wants a cloud, preferably Amazon. I absolutely imagine how to do this in the form of iron servers, but Amazon, as someone else, is not given to me. I created a test machine on linux, as their trial allows, but that's all, I can't figure out how to calculate the cost of their services, as I understand it, of all the services I only need lightsail to have regular VPS and a network between them. What will be the cost of the entire system? Just the cost of the VM? Or do they charge some kind of subscription fee for the lightsail itself, for the network, for traffic, for VPC? I can't find it in the control panel at all.

Answer 1

lightsail, as you might guess from the name, is a simplified (lightweight) interface over computing - Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) services. And a little cheaper due to the fact that they give you little control. However, it immediately implements some patterns and sets of services for a quick start. This is the way of startups.
Lightsail, as far as I remember, runs in a "default VPC" that is managed by AWS and where all the servers live on a public subnet, which is insecure.
The scheme that you want is probably implemented by lightsail, but for more control it is still recommended to organize your own VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) - a component of AWS network services.
In your case, you will need something like (to estimate the cost):
1. Balancer:
- ALB\ELB service (separate pricing). Service HA provides AWS
or
- two instances of the balancer you need (Nginx, HAProxy and others). HA and others are provided by you.
2. N backends of the required type (see the cost of a specific instance that meets your needs)
3. replicated bases:
- you can take 2 instances of the required capacity (pay for instances) and set everything up yourself
or
- take RDS (separate service, different pricing) of the required base where HA and maintenance will be handled by AWS for you, providing you with an endpoint to connect from the servers.
4. File storage. This is more interesting
If you have Windows: you will need two instances for fault tolerance and HA
If you have *nix : you can do the same as with WIndows or take EFS (a separate service where you pay for used space) which is highly available and can be connected to different *nix instances at the same time.
5. VPC internals VPC
is organized in the same way as any network in the iron equivalent.
Subnets - private, public
Routing settings for public subnets, for private subnets via NAT instance\service
NAT instance or
VPN instance or bastion service (to access instances in a private subnet)
Here you can already calculate how much it will cost approximately to own only instances and the necessary services.
How much you will have unforeseen expenses for data transfer, etc. - you can only see the billing results for the first month.
This is my personal opinion on how it should be done in your case.
It may turn out that you can’t master (everyone has their own mastering speed) it’s fast enough and faster to implement another scheme - it’s up to you

Answer 2

you have to pay for everything: servers, traffic, storage, ....
Here is the price: https://aws.amazon.com/pricing/services/