This post was co-authored by Staff Cloud Specialist SE, Ed Schmookler, and VMware Cloud Specialist SE, Robert Riemer.
Ever wondered how to quickly estimate your AWS egress fees prior to migrating to VMware Cloud on AWS?
Keep reading to learn how by using just one search string from a VMware product, named Network Insight.
But first a quick recap on VMware Cloud on AWS.
VMware Cloud on AWS is an on-demand service that enables you to run applications across vSphere-based cloud environments with access to a broad range of AWS services. Powered by VMware Cloud Foundation, this service integrates vSphere, vSAN and NSX along with VMware vCenter management, and is optimized to run on dedicated, elastic, bare-metal AWS infrastructure. With this service, IT teams can manage their cloud-based resources with familiar VMware tools.
With VMware Cloud on AWS we can help customers meet many different organizational objectives. One of the more common use-cases is around Data Center migrations.
During the decision-making process around migrating workloads to VMware Cloud on AWS, it is important to also consider the AWS data egress fees. For example, if an application were being migrated from an on-premises Data Center to VMware Cloud on AWS, client-side traffic accessing this application now residing in VMware Cloud on AWS would be considered as AWS egress data and subject to a small fee.
So, what is Network Insight and how can it help estimate what those egress fees might look like prior to migrating?
Network Insight is purpose-built for network virtualization and public cloud security. It provides complete network visibility into all application traffic – within the cloud and to the internet. Network Insight does this by integrating deeply with virtual and physical data center network layers, connecting the dots between the two, and across your AWS and VMware networks.
Network Insight is search-driven. Simply type a network or security query in plain English language text to find deep insights. Network Insight is agent-less, which makes it easy to maintain and scale as your cloud infrastructure grows over time.
VMware is all about choice. If you prefer SaaS and want a consumption-based model, you can use Network Insight as a service by requesting access today. If you want the flexibility of deploying Network Insight in your data center and prefer a perpetual licensing model, you can get the same functionality in the form of Network Insight.
It is advised to have Network Insight installed in your environment for a reasonable amount of time to collect sufficient data. This will vary from environment to environment, 1-2 weeks will work, but a month or more is much better.
First, we will build an application within Network Insight. Applications are a grouping function and we will leverage a traditional 3-tier application model. It is important to note that this is not absolutely required. We could leverage any data set within the tool (i.e. “Source Layer2 Subnet” or “Source VM” or “Source Cluster”), you get the idea…
Go to Security in left window navigation, then to Applications
Click on Add Applications
In our example, we pre-created an application named “3tier” with the following content.
To estimate the egress data traffic, we use the following search parameters.
Sum (total bytes) of flows where Source Application = ‘3tier’ and Flow Type = ‘Destination is Internet’
Note: In our example, we are using the last 30 days as the time horizon, but this is user configurable.
To display and later export all the flows that match our “3tier” application for egress we leverage the following search parameters.
flows where Source Application = ‘3tier’ and Flow Type = ‘Destination is Internet’
Note: In our example, we are using the last 30 days as the time horizon, but this is user configurable.
We can also export this data into a CSV.
This is an example of what an exported CSV file looks like.
The egress fee for VMware Cloud on AWS outbound traffic is based on a pre-negotiated flat rate of $0.05 per gigabyte. Now all we have to do is multiply the number of gigabytes by $0.05 to obtain the total cost.
Below is an example estimate of 5 TB of outbound traffic. The estimated egress fee will be a total of $250
Note: If you are leveraging AWS Direct Connect, the data transfer charges will be billed directly by AWS at your organization’s negotiated rates.
