Approximate monthly AWS cost per environment (us-east-1, on-demand list prices; Spot reduces EC2 ~70%). Dev runs on Minikube (local) so it is effectively free apart from shared S3/ECR.
| Resource | Dev (Minikube) | Staging (EKS) | Production (EKS) |
|---|---|---|---|
| EKS control plane | $0 | ~$73 | ~$73 |
| EC2 nodes (Spot) | $0 | ~$30 | ~$60 |
| NAT Gateway | $0 | ~$32 (single-AZ) | ~$64 (multi-AZ) |
| S3 + state/locking | ~$1 | ~$2 | ~$2 |
| ECR storage | ~$1 | ~$1 | ~$1 |
| EBS volumes (Prometheus/Loki/PV) | $0 | ~$10 | ~$20 |
| Secrets Manager | $0 | ~$1 | ~$1 |
| Estimated total | ~$2/mo | ~$149/mo | ~$221/mo |
Production is off during showcase, so the production column is the projected cost if its runtime were enabled — it currently incurs $0.
- Spot node groups on staging (and burst on production).
- Single-AZ NAT on staging; multi-AZ only on production.
- Staging can be shut down outside working hours (~60% saving): scale node
group to 0 or
terraform destroythe cluster (state + ECR persist). - ECR lifecycle policy: 10 images staging / 20 production.
- Prometheus/Loki retention tuned per env (2d dev, 15d/7d EKS).
Running staging only keeps the live bill near ~$149/mo, or lower with off-hours shutdown. Dev/local validation is free.
A Grafana CI/CD + cost panel and AWS Cost Explorer tags (environment,
project=mck21-devsecops) make spend attributable per environment.