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I am working on an Rails 6 application, already on production which is heavily dependent on AWS Services like S3, Lambda, Cloudtrail, SNS and CDN to serve a video-on-demand app, where users can upload large videos and view and share it with anyone.

As we all know that AWS services can be expensive, I tried spending good time understanding the AWS pricing Calculator and understanding how much it can costs as I have few features that are given to every user on the application, which I believe may incur or add more costs. I am still not able to understand entirely and hence posting it here to get some reliable help based on my queries listed below -

On the application, user is allowed to upload large videos of upto 5GB, and can also share with others using a shareable link, So can this add to more cost as in the AWS Pricing calculator, the data read/write on the CDN show 0 and no extra cost. Does that mean that no matter how many times the user shares his large uploaded video, its not going to be costly at all, if YES , then how and when? Apart from the cost effectiveness of S3, AWS Lambda, which I am aware of, For AWS CDN, do I have to pay for every read that the user is watching the video, So the more big the video, the more are the charges, is that correct? My concern is that I want to give users the freedom to share large videos but is it feasible and cost effective using CDN or the more you read, the more you pay...What is the right way to understand it?

Thanks in advance.

Milind
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AWS CloudFront pricing is here. Key points:

  • Traffic S3 -> CloudFront is free
  • The first 1TB of traffic per month from CloudFront to users is free
  • Beyond that you pay per byte downloaded by users - there's a chart on that page but for users in the USA it's $0.085/GB whereas for other regions it can be up to $0.120 / GB
Tim
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  • Thanks @Tim...but what do you mean by "downloaded"...from the CDN users can view the videos and download it as well from S3..is it about watching the videos from CDN and after 1TB of data being read, it will be chargeable ? – Milind Aug 05 '22 at 11:42
  • Yes. To watch a video you need to download the files that make it up, and that's how the CDN CloudFront and S3 both phrase things in their pricing. – Tim Aug 05 '22 at 21:32