Estimate MSF application monthly cost for sizing decisions, budgeting, and optimization analysis. All prices below are us-east-1 — verify against MSF pricing page (opens in a new tab) for other regions.

Pricing Components

Component	Price (us-east-1)	Notes
KPU-hour	$0.11 / KPU-hour	Per allocated KPU per running hour
Orchestration KPU	$0.11 / hour	1 additional KPU per running app, always billed
Running application storage	$0.10 / GB-month	50 GB per KPU is included free. Only the bytes above `KPU_count × 50 GB` are billable. Do not bill the 50 GB allocation itself.
Durable application backups (snapshots)	$0.023 / GB-month	Billed for total snapshot footprint

There is no separate charge for application code in S3 (your S3 bucket cost only) and no per-API-call charge for Flink REST API or kinesisanalyticsv2 operations.

Formula

KPU_count   = Parallelism / ParallelismPerKPU
Total_KPUs  = KPU_count + 1                                    # orchestration

KPU_cost     = Total_KPUs × $0.11 × hours_per_month
storage_cost = max(0, state_GB - KPU_count × 50) × $0.10
backup_cost  = total_snapshot_GB × $0.023

monthly_total = KPU_cost + storage_cost + backup_cost

24/7 = 730 hours/month. Most production apps stay under the 50 GB/KPU storage included tier.

Sizing → Cost Reference (24/7, $0 storage)

Input Rate	Parallelism	PPK	KPUs (+orch)	Monthly
< 5 MB/s	2	1	2+1=3	$241
5–20 MB/s	4	1	4+1=5	$402
20–50 MB/s	8	2	4+1=5	$402
50–100 MB/s	16	2	8+1=9	$723
100–200 MB/s	32	2	16+1=17	$1,365
200–500 MB/s	64	4	16+1=17	$1,365
> 500 MB/s	128+	4	32+1=33+	$2,650+

These assume stateless-to-moderate stateful workloads. Stateful workloads (keyed windows with large state) typically require PPK=1, doubling KPU count and cost vs. the stateless equivalent.

Worked Examples

Small / development (Parallelism=2, PPK=1, 24/7, negligible state, no snapshots):

KPU count: 2 / 1 = 2 application KPUs, plus 1 orchestration KPU = 3 billed KPUs
KPU cost: 3 × $0.11 × 730 = $240.90
Running application storage: state ≤ 2 × 50 GB included → $0 (the 50 GB/KPU allocation is included, not separately billable; do not multiply 50 × $0.10 per KPU)
Snapshot cost: $0 (none retained)
Total: ~$241/month

The orchestration KPU is the most common sizing mistake at this scale: it raises the bill from $158 (2 KPUs) to $241 (3 KPUs), a 52% increase. Always include it.

Medium production (8 parallel, PPK=1, 24/7, 5 GB state):

KPUs: 8 + 1 = 9 → 9 × $0.11 × 730 = $722.70
Storage: 5 GB ≤ 8 × 50 GB included → $0
Snapshots: 5 GB × $0.023 = $0.12
Total: ~$723/month

Enterprise with autoscaling (avg 16 KPU, peak 32 KPU 20% of time, 60 GB state):

Peak: 33 × $0.11 × 146 = $530
Off-peak: 17 × $0.11 × 584 = $1,092
Snapshots: 60 GB × $0.023 = $1.38
Total: ~$1,623/month

Cost Optimization Levers

Ranked by typical impact:

Right-size PPK for workload: Stateless apps at PPK=2 cost half of PPK=1 at the same parallelism. Rule of thumb: stateless → PPK=2; stateful → PPK=1.
Stop non-prod when idle: Dev/test apps run 200h/month vs 730h is a 73% reduction. Snapshot before stop, restore on start.
Enable autoscaling for variable load: 30–50% average reduction for spiky workloads with predictable off-peaks.
Match Parallelism to source partitions: Idle subtasks waste KPUs. Parallelism > shard/partition count creates them.
Snapshot retention strategy: Without retention, a streaming app’s snapshot footprint grows monotonically.
Always remember the orchestration KPU: At 1–2 KPU sizing it’s 33–50% of the bill — easy to under-estimate.

Common Mistakes

Mistake	Impact
Forgetting orchestration KPU	Under-estimates by 1 KPU = $80/month at 24/7
Confusing Parallelism with KPU count	Wrong with PPK > 1; KPUs = Parallelism / PPK
Using us-east-1 prices for other regions	Prices vary; check the pricing page
Estimating peak as average	Autoscaling jobs have asymmetric peak/off-peak — calculate separately
Ignoring CloudWatch metric cardinality cost	OPERATOR/PARALLELISM metric levels add custom-metric cost (not MSF cost). See monitoring-and-metrics.md

References

MSF Pricing (opens in a new tab)
resource-optimization.md — KPU sizing inputs for the calculator
scaling-decisions.md — cost impact of scaling actions

references/pricing-calculator.md

Raw file

aws/agent-toolkit-for-aws