AWS Server Small pricing clarification

Hi, I’m using KNIME Server Small on AWS. Typically when doing EC2 changes/testing I’ll switch off KNIME using sudo systemctl stop knime-server.service with the aim of saving cost.

When looking at my cost for yesterday, however, (when I was testing some EC2 instance configurations) I could see based on the cost that the EC2 instance was running for ~3hours yet my KNIME cost was the equivalent of running it for 13 hours yesterday! And clearly it’s impossible for my KNIME Server to be running longer than the EC2 instance!

This implies that even if KNIME is only on for a second we get charged for an hour???

Today I’ve started an EC2 instance a couple of times for about a minute to test a new stop-instance script. On the above premise Amazon will charge me for 2 mins usage (about $0.01) yet from what I can tell KNIME will charge me $4.14 (since KNIME auto-starts with the EC2 instance and I started the EC2 instance twice, so 2 lots of the $2.07 hourly cost) even though I didn’t actually use KNIME!

Is this correct? And is it right? Surely KNIME should apply a usage policy similar to the EC2 instance with a granularity of seconds (and a minimum duration of 1 minute)?

Am I being over-charged or is this how it works? And if turns out to be the latter does anyone have any ideas on potentially how to de-couple KNIME from auto-starting with the instance to prevent a reoccurrence of this?

Thanks

Hi @dpowyslybbe,

I’m afraid we (KNIME) have no control over how AWS bills for AMI usage. They charge per hour of usage whether you use the instance for 1 second or the full hour. AWS also does not distinguish based on the services running, i.e. as soon as the VM is running, it will charge for KNIME usage, independent of whether the knime-server.service is running or not.

This is common for AWS and does not only impact KNIME. Hence, it does make sense to keep the VM running in blocks. While it is running, it should not be an issue to restart the KNIME Server service over and over though, in case you want to test multiple configurations.

Kind regards
Marvin

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