An interesting move from AWS, they just announced a flat-rate pricing option for CloudFront. You might wonder what that means. In simple terms it means that you pay a fixed monthly price, without overage charges, regardless of your traffic, even if you go viral or suffer a DDOS attack. On the other hand even if you have no traffic or a minimal amount of traffic, you still pay the flat-rate.
What’s even more interesting is that the flat-rate pricing is not only for CloudFront but includes:
- CloudFront CDN
- AWS WAF and DDOS protection
- Bot management and analytics
- Amazon Route53 DNS
- Amazon CloudWatch log ingestion
- Serverless edge compute
- And a monthly allowance on Amazon S3 credits
Plans start at $0 (as in “there is a Free plan”) and continue with Pro ($15 a month), Business ($200/month), Premium ($1000/month), Custom (you have to contact them).
For more details on what each plan includes you can go to the pricing page
But is it too good to be true?
As always, it depends. For personal/small projects is a no-brainer. Even the Pro ($15) plan is worth it as you get 25 included WAF rules, logging covered, 50GB of S3 storage, 10 million CloudFront requests and 50 TB data transfer.
Keep in mind that each pricing plan covers one CloudFront distribution (with up to one domain) that combines essential features and services into one monthly price.
Now if we talk about production workloads that have significant amount of traffic, I would be a little bit more cautious. That is because there is this possibility that if you go over your monthly quota AWS might throttle your traffic.
CAUTION
“AWS may take appropriate action, which may include reducing your performance (e.g. throttling) or requiring a change to your pricing structure. Blocked DDoS attacks and requests blocked by AWS WAF never count against your usage allowance”
So you think you can go back to pay as you go pricing. You can, BUT ONLY after your current flat-rate month ends. So if you’re at the middle of your month and you exceed traffic you might get throttled. The key word is “might”.
Think about what kind of traffic you could realistically get and choose based on that. The good news is that DDoS or blocked requests do not count (as highlighted above).
Can you switch existing CloudFront distributions to the flat-rate plan?
Again, it depends. If you have a standard CloudFront distribution you should be able to switch, however if you’re using certain unsupported features then you might not be able to switch your distribution to the new flat-rate pricing.
For example this website is actually served through a CloudFront distribution and I was not able to switch to flat-rate pricing as I am using a price class for this distribution.
Conclusion
AWS users asked for a long time for a spending cap and essentially this is a step in that direction.
You just need to carefully consider your use case and your traffic numbers and expected traffic numbers and you can then choose the best pricing schema for your particular workload.