How do I reduce AWS Backup costs for Amazon RDS and Aurora resources?

Short description

The following factors can increase the monthly cost of backup storage for Amazon RDS and Aurora resources:

• Database storage size
• Database workload patterns
• Backup retention period
• Manual snapshots

For more information about costs, see Demystifying Amazon RDS backup storage costs and Understanding Amazon Aurora backup storage usage.

Resolution

Remove backups for non-essential RDS and Aurora resources

The size and number of DB instances or clusters that you back up affects your backup costs.

Although it's a best practice to back up your required resources, remove backups for non-essential resources to reduce backup costs. You can use AWS Trusted Advisor to determine the resources that are idle or underused. Also, identify the resources that don't require a backup or that you can right size.

To remove non-essential Amazon RDS and Aurora resources, you can delete DB snapshots and delete retained automated backups.

Note: If you identify non-essential automated backups for DB instances or clusters, then enter 0 for Backup retention period to deactivate the automated backup.

Or, use the AWS Backup console to change your resource assignments and update your backup plans to remove non-essential resources. For a tag-based resource assignment, you must delete and create a new backup resource assignment for your backup plan. Or, change the tags on your resources.

If you have a backup policy for AWS Organizations, then update the backup selections in your backup policy configurations.

If your Aurora workload usage frequently changes, then use Aurora Serverless v2 as a cost-effective option for periods of low activity.

For more information about cost reduction, see Best practices for the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

Check for high writes and updates to your databases

Monitor your RDS instance metrics or Aurora cluster metrics for high writes and updates to your databases that can increase your backup costs. Backups store all incremental changes within the retention period. To decrease your backup costs, reduce the number of updates that you make to the database.

Modify the retention period of your backup plan or policy

You can reduce your backup retention period to decrease costs.

Complete the following steps:

1. Open the AWS Backup console.
2. In the navigation pane, choose Backup plans, and then select the backup plan.
3. In the Backup rules section, select the rule that you want to change, and then choose Edit.
4. In the Lifecycle section, under Total retention period, decrease the retention period.
   Note: For AWS Organizations, update the backup rules in your policy.

Important: If you create one backup plan that includes multiple Amazon RDS or Aurora databases with a longer retention period, then your costs might increase. To avoid increased costs, create a backup plan for each database or group of related databases. Customize the retention periods for each backup plan to meet each database or database group recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) requirements.

Set your retention period to more than the minimum retention period

To avoid additional charges for backups and backup copies, it's a best practice to configure your retention period with a warm storage duration. Set the duration to at least 7 days.

Remove backups and snapshots outside your backup retention period

Note: If you receive errors when you run AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) commands, then see Troubleshooting errors for the AWS CLI. Also, make sure that you're using the most recent AWS CLI version.

If you use the Amazon RDS console or AWS CLI to create automated or manual snapshots outside AWS Backup, then you might incur storage costs. For information about how to view your charges, see Where can I see charges for AWS Backup in my AWS account bill?

To reduce your backup costs, delete your automated snapshot backups or manual snapshots outside your defined retention period.

Take the following actions:

• If you used AWS Backup to create a snapshot, then you must use AWS Backup to delete the backup.
• If you used the Amazon RDS console to create manual snapshots, then you must use the Amazon RDS console to delete the DB snapshot or DB cluster snapshot.
• If you used the Amazon RDS console to create automated snapshots, then you must use the Amazon RDS console to delete non-essential automated backups.

Note: For Aurora, manual snapshots don't incur a storage charge for up to 35 days during the retention period. For snapshots that you retain after the 35 day period, AWS charges the snapshots as full backups.

Monitor high backup storage costs for database instances

Manual snapshots that you create outside AWS Backup remain in your AWS account even when you delete the RDS DB instance. Also, AWS Backup might create on-demand backups that have an unexpectedly longer retention period.

To monitor high backup storage costs for stored resources in your account, take the following actions:

• View existing backup costs. Filter by backup vault or protected resources.
• Identify Amazon RDS instances that have the maximum number of snapshots, the oldest snapshots, or orphaned snapshots. Then, delete the backups or snapshots that you no longer need.
• Use cost allocation tags to organize and monitor costs and AWS Cost Explorer to analyze costs and usage.

Note:

• AWS doesn't charge you for the backup storage of up to 100% the size of DB instances or clusters in the AWS Region where they're located. For more information, see Amazon RDS pricing and Amazon Aurora pricing.
• Amazon RDS and Aurora support continuous and point-in-time recovery (PITR) backups in AWS Backup, but their cross-Region and cross-account copies are snapshot backups. For more information, see Feature availability by AWS Region.
• Amazon RDS and Aurora continuous backups don't incur higher costs compared with snapshot backups because AWS charges you for backup storage in both cases. For more information, see AWS Backup pricing.
• If you use backup copies, then you incur RPO and RTO costs. Amazon RDS supports cross-Region and cross-account copies from incremental backups. Aurora supports cross-Region and cross-account copies from full backups. For more information, see Feature availability by resource. For more information about Aurora costs, see Cost-effective disaster recovery for Amazon Aurora databases using AWS Backup.

Related information

Metering, costs, and billing for AWS Backup

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