Costs & Budgeting for AWS Runner

This guide outlines the costs associated with the AWS runner infrastructure. It does not include development environment costs or license fees.

Note: AWS costs mentioned in this document are subject to change and may vary by region. Please check the latest pricing on the AWS pricing pages.

What is an AWS runner?

An AWS Runner is an orchestrator for development environments deployed within an AWS account.

The key characteristics of a runner are:

• Shared resource serving multiple users (not personal)
• Designed for “always-on” operation with optimized cost efficiency
• Suitable for small to medium-sized organizations with a single runner architecture
• Support for multiple runners to:
  • Enhance availability
  • Reduce latency for end users
  • Ensure data residency and compliance

Billable AWS Resources

The following are the billable resources deployed by the AWS runner:

• AWS::ECS::Service: Used to manage the environments.
• AWS::DynamoDB::Table: Used to store state related to the reconciler of environments.
• AWS::S3::Bucket: Used to store user image and build Docker caches for performance.
• AWS::Logs::LogGroup: Used to store logs related to the runner ECS task.

Baseline Costs of a Runner

The primary cost associated with a runner is the ECS task.

• Monthly Cost for ECS: Less than $8 per month, which is covered by the AWS free tier. This cost is fixed and does not vary with the number of environments.
• Other services: Costs for DynamoDB, S3, and CloudWatch typically account for less than 1% of the overall runner cost.

Controls for Managing Costs

Viewing Runner Costs

To view isolated runner costs in AWS Cost Explorer:

1. Navigate to AWS Cost Explorer.
2. Group by Usage Type to analyze the breakdown of costs.
3. Filter by the CloudFormation stack name, which can be found on your runner card in the Settings > Runners section.
   • CloudFormation Stack: Use the aws:cloudformation:stack-name tag.
   • Cluster Name: Alternatively, filter by the aws:ecs:clusterName tag.

Viewing Environment Costs

To view isolated runner costs in AWS Cost Explorer:

1. Navigate to AWS Cost Explorer.
2. Group by Usage Type to analyze the breakdown of costs.
3. Filter by the environment ID using the Name tag:
   • Tag: Name
   • Value: gitpod-environment-<ID>
   • You can find the environment ID by selecting Copy ID from the environment details.