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Cost Management

Retool Self-hosted provides customers the flexibility of deploying Retool into their public cloud provider. When budgeting for Retool, it is important to estimate and monitor those service charges. This document will review the use of AWS functionality to help estimate, tag, budget, explore and monitor.

Similar cost management functionality is available for Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Platform.

Example Retool Deployment​

Retool Self-hosted in AWS, shown in the following diagram, focuses on using Amazon Kubernetes Service for deploying Retool containers. The significant cost drivers in this deployment are the compute and database services.

Example AWS Architecture for Retool

It is recommended that customers employ Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to configure Kubernetes and supporting services. Base Terraform templates exist for EKS, AKS, and GKE providing a starting point.

In this configuration, an AWS VPC with two availability zones is created. Within this VPC, an Amazon EKS cluster employs two Amazon EC2 instances in the managed node group that Amazon EKS controls. A Multi-AZ Elastic Load Balancer is created to forward incoming traffic to the Amazon EC2 instances. An Amazon RDS instance using Multi-AZ is created separately for the Retool Platform Database. The following sections describe the instance types/sizes recommended for a production medium configuration.

Amazon EC2 Managed Node Configuration​

For the Amazon EC2 requirement, the following instance type/resource is recommended.

  • Instance Count = 2
  • Instance size = m5.xlarge (4 vCPU and 16 GB of RAM)
  • Amazon EBS volume size = 150 GiB storage that can expand

Amazon RDS Configuration​

Retool requires a PostgreSQL database to store apps, workflows, permission groups, and more. In this example, we are recommending the following instance type/resources.:

  • Instance size = db.m6g.xlarge (4 vCPU and 16 GB of RAM)
  • Configuration = multi-AZ enabled for failover
  • Amazon RDS storage size = 80 GB storage that can expand

Other required services​

Retool instances also require other AWS services, which are detailed in the Appendix: Example Estimate.

Estimating Costs​

The following costs were calculated using Amazon Pricing Calculator that estimates costs but may not accurately reflect your actual monthly costs. These costs are meant for illustration purposes and users should be actively monitoring their accounts with AWS Billing and Cost Management.

With the information in the Example Deployment section, we can leverage the Amazon Pricing Calculator to estimate monthly/annual costs, initially focusing on EKS, EC2, and RDS. The following video demonstrates the use of the pricing calculator by walking through the Terraform Template configuration.

AWS Pricing Calculator Walkthrough​

This video specified On-Demand instance types from the Ohio Region (us-east-2) for the EC2 managed nodes and the RDS instance. For customers planning on running Retool 24x7x365, it is best to consider AWS's savings options. The following section will cover these considerations.

Reducing Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS costs​

The Retool architecture leverages both EC2 and RDS instances. AWS provides two mechanisms we can employ to help discount the monthly runtime and database storage. Reserved Instances and Savings Plans allow customers to enter into a one —or three-year agreement, significantly reducing costs.

Reserved Instances​

For Retool, we can consider reserved instances for both EC2 and RDS. Reserved instances contracts come in one—and three-year lengths. The longer the commitment, the higher the savings. Reserved instances allow you to specify an instance type, and when the instance is running, the agreed-upon discount is applied to the monthly bill. On average, one can save 60% on monthly costs.

Savings Plans​

Savings plans provide flexibility to the RI approach, where you can change the EC2 instance within the family selected, such as m5.small, m5.medium, m5.large, etc. This allows the EC2 instance to be vertically scaled if the Retool instance requires more resources. On average, one can save 60-70% on monthly costs. Other benefits that Savings Plans provide are:

  • Ability to apply across regions
  • Ability to change tenancy
  • Ability to change OS

NOTE: Saving plans do not support Amazon RDS, so Reserved Instances provide the current cost savings option.

The following video demonstrates accessing a Reserved Instance or Savings Plan estimates within the AWS Pricing Calculator.

Cost Comparison​

The following table demonstrates the different cost options for EC2 and RDS with a 3-year commitment and the percent total savings from On Demand running in the us-east-2, Ohio region using the configuration outlined in the Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS configuration above.

EC2 On DemandEC2 Standard ReservedCompute Savings PlanEC2 Instance Saving Plan
$300.80 per month$141.66 per month$162.10 per month$141.66 per month

RDS does not provide savings plans, but reserved instances are available with partial or full upfront payment. The figure below uses a full upfront payment to arrive at the highest discount.

RDS On DemandRDS Standard Reserved
$526.48 per month$157.39 per month + upfront $3427.00

With these figures identified, let's compare an On Demand versus Savings Plan / Reserved Instance for percent difference.

Plan TypeEC2 CostsRDS CostsTotal Monthly CostsTotal 3-year Costs
On Demand300.80 USD526.48 USD827.28 USD29782.08 USD
Savings Plan + Reserved Instance141.66 USD157.39 USD299.05 USD10765.80 USD + $3427.00 USD (RDS Upfront) = 14192.80 USD

We can calculate the percent savings by performing the following calculation:

(On Demand - Savings Plan)/(On Demand) x 100

Or:

($29782.08 - $14192.80)/(29782.08) * 100 = 52.3%

In effect, we are reducing our spending by over 50% through Savings Plans and RDS Reserved Instances.

Tagging Infrastructure​

Once you have entered into a contract, it is recommended that you use Resource Tagging to help identify the EC2 instances, S3 bucket(s), ELB, RDS instance, and more as part of the Retool instance. The purpose of tags is to make it easier to leverage AWS tooling for operations and cost/billing management. This is done through filters where tags are employed to narrow search results. The following examples are tags for individual EC2 instances in separate AWS Accounts / VPCs, where Lower Environment is development and testing instances and Production is the production/customer-facing instance:

Account Retool Lower Environment
  • cost_center = development
  • team = internal_tools
  • environment = dev
Account Retool Lower Environment
  • cost_center = development
  • team = internal_tools
  • environment = test
Account Retool Production
  • cost_center = development
  • team = internal_tools
  • environment = production

In the above tags, the environment tag allows Cost Explorer users to filter on the development cost_center of the internal_tools team and independently filter on the environment using dev, test, and production environment values. Examine the following best practices for tagging in AWS.

Implement A Tag​

Once we have identified tags we want to use to decorate our AWS infrastructure, you will have several implementation options. Terraform can be employed to create tags in the underlying AWS infrastructure; the following example demonstrates how to implement that. Additionally, one can use an admin user within the AWS Console and implement tags.

Terraform​

Within a Terraform template, the following example shows how a tag can be set on an EC2 instance.

provider "aws" { 
   region = "us-east-1" 
 } 

   resource "aws_instance" "example" { 
   ami = "ami-0c55b159cbfafe1f0" # Replace with your desired AMI ID instance_type = "t2.micro" 

   tags = { 
     Cost_center = "development" 
     Team = "internal_tools" 
     Env = "production" } 
}

AWS Admin Console​

An administrator can access an EC2 instance and easily add tags within the AWS Admin Console. However, if the infrastructure is terminated, those tags are also terminated and must be manually reapplied. Therefore, the recommendation is always to use Infrastructure As Code (IaC) to manage your AWS resources.

The following video demonstrates how to access Tags and add one to an instance.

AWS Cost and Billing Management​

The final step of operating Retool is to monitor the spending and set thresholds for the Retool instances running within Amazon EKS / EC2 / RDS.

AWS Budgets​

AWS Budgets should specify a spending limit on a particular AWS Account with tagged infrastructure. Defining a threshold is critical to provide a warning/notification mechanism if costs exceed what you have estimated and observed within the AWS Billing and Management Console. The following link provides best practices for employing AWS Budgets.

The following video shows setting a budget based on the estimation defined previously.

Review Monthly Spend​

With AWS Billing and Cost Management, Cost Explorer provides analytics on previous months' bills and current spending. Using this console, one can examine costs from many dimensions, dig into specific tagged infrastructure, individual or aggregated AWS Services, and more.

The estimates generated by the AWS Pricing Calculator should be reviewed with actual spending, if not all AWS services were identified in the estimate. This also allows the customer to identify further optimizations that can be performed on the Retool instance. Examples could include EBS storage, network costs, and more.

Monitoring Utilization​

Retool Self-hosted Telemetry agent/vector provides a powerful way to monitor the Retool Self-hosted instance(s) resource consumption. A customer can install an agent to forward data to Amazon S3 buckets or custom sinks. Once the data has been stored, solutions like AWS CloudWatch or Prometheus can be employed to examine overall consumption helping with right-sizing your infrastructure. The following image shows an example of a console displaying various metrics.

Example metric monitoring

Summary​

Retool Self-hosted provides a flexible installation option for Enterprise customers who want to run within an established public cloud provider. The example demonstrates leveraging the AWS Pricing Calculator, Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, and AWS Billing and Cost Management tooling to estimate, reduce, and monitor costs.

Appendix​

Example Estimate for a Small-size Production Instance​

  • Number of Retool Apps = 1-10
  • Number of Retool Workflows = 1-15

The following table provides a deeper dive into additional costs such as VPC, EBS, and more. The following services are captured in this estimate and represent a single production cluster only over a 3 year window with a 3-year Reserved Instance pricing (partial upfront) for RDS and a 3-year EC2 Instance Savings Plan (no upfront).

NameSummaryRegionUpfront costMonthly Cost
Amazon VPCNumber of NAT Gateways (2) DT Inbound: Internet (1 TB per month), DT Outbound: Internet (1 TB per month), DT Intra-Region: (0 TB per month), Data transfer cost (92.16)US East (Ohio)0.00 USD166.86 USD
Amazon EKSNumber of hybrid nodes (0 per month), Number of EKS Clusters (1)US East (Ohio)0.00 USD73.00 USD
Amazon EC2 / EBSTenancy (Shared Instances), Operating system (Linux), Workload (Consistent, Number of instances: 2), Advance EC2 instance (m5.xlarge), Pricing strategy (EC2 Instance Savings Plans 3yr No Upfront), Enable monitoring (disabled), EBS Storage amount (80 GB), DT Inbound: Not selected (0 TB per month), DT Outbound: Not selected (0 TB per month), DT Intra-Region: (0 TB per month)US East (Ohio)0.00 USD141.66 USD
Amazon Route53Hosted Zones (1), Additional Records in Hosted Zones (10), Basic Checks Within AWS (10)US East (Ohio)0.00 USD10.91 USD
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQLStorage amount (80 GB), Storage volume (General Purpose SSD (gp2)), Nodes (1), Instance Type (db.m6g.large), Utilization (On-Demand only) (100 %Utilized/Month), Deployment Option (Multi-AZ), Pricing Model (Reserved), Lease Offering Term (3yr), Purchase Option (Partial Upfront)US East (Ohio)1713.00 USD*87.90 USD
Elastic Load BalancingNumber of Application Load Balancers (1)US East (Ohio)0.00 USD39.79 USD
AWS Secrets ManagerNumber of secrets (20), Average duration of each secret (30 days), Number of API calls (100 per month)US East (Ohio)0.00 USD8.00 USD
Monthly Costs528.12 USD

Taking the monthly costs and upfront costs, we can examine the year 1, 2 and 3 costs shown in the following table.

NameUpfront CostsAnnual Costs
Year 1 Costs1713.00 USD8050.44 USD (Includes upfront cost)
Year 2 Costs6337.44 USD
Year 3 Costs6337.44 USD

*NOTE: Upfront cost for the Amazon RDS instance means you pay $1713.00 when starting up the database to receive the 3-year Reserved Instance pricing of $87.90 per month.

Example Estimate for a Medium-size Production Instance​

  • Number of Retool Apps = 11-50
  • Number of Retool Workflows = 16-30

The following table provides a deeper dive into additional costs such as VPC, EBS, and more. The following services are captured in this estimate and represent a single production cluster only over a 3 year window with a 3-year Reserved Instance pricing (partial upfront) for RDS and a 3-year EC2 Instance Savings Plan (no upfront).

NameSummaryRegionUpfront costMonthly Cost
Amazon VPCNumber of NAT Gateways (2) DT Inbound: Internet (1 TB per month), DT Outbound: Internet (1 TB per month), DT Intra-Region: (0 TB per month), Data transfer cost (92.16)US East (Ohio)0.00 USD166.86 USD
Amazon EKSNumber of hybrid nodes (0 per month), Number of EKS Clusters (1)US East (Ohio)0.00 USD73.00 USD
Amazon EC2 / EBSTenancy (Shared Instances), Operating system (Linux), Workload (Consistent, Number of instances: 2), Advance EC2 instance (m5.xlarge), Pricing strategy (EC2 Instance Savings Plans 3yr No Upfront), Enable monitoring (disabled), EBS Storage amount (128 GB), DT Inbound: Not selected (0 TB per month), DT Outbound: Not selected (0 TB per month), DT Intra-Region: (0 TB per month)US East (Ohio)0.00 USD141.66 USD
Amazon Route53Hosted Zones (1), Additional Records in Hosted Zones (10), Basic Checks Within AWS (10)US East (Ohio)0.00 USD10.91 USD
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQLStorage amount (80 GB), Storage volume (General Purpose SSD (gp2)), Nodes (1), Instance Type (db.m6g.xlarge), Utilization (On-Demand only) (100 %Utilized/Month), Deployment Option (Multi-AZ), Pricing Model (Reserved), Lease Offering Term (3yr), Purchase Option (Partial Upfront)US East (Ohio)3,427.00 USD*157.39 USD
Elastic Load BalancingNumber of Application Load Balancers (1)US East (Ohio)0.00 USD39.79 USD
AWS Secrets ManagerNumber of secrets (20), Average duration of each secret (30 days), Number of API calls (100 per month)US East (Ohio)0.00 USD8.00 USD
Monthly Costs597.61 USD

Taking the monthly costs and upfront costs, we can examine the year 1, 2 and 3 costs shown in the following table.

NameUpfront CostsAnnual Costs
Year 1 Costs3427.00 USD10598.32 USD (Includes upfront cost)
Year 2 Costs7171.32 USD
Year 3 Costs7171.32 USD

*NOTE: Upfront cost for the Amazon RDS instance means you pay $6854.00 when starting up the database to receive the 3-year Reserved Instance pricing of $409.76 per month.

Example Estimate for a Large-size Production Instance​

  • Number of Retool Apps = 51-100
  • Number of Retool Workflows = 31-50

The following table provides a deeper dive into additional costs such as VPC, EBS, and more. The following services are captured in this estimate and represent a single production cluster only over a 3 year window with a 3-year Reserved Instance pricing (partial upfront) for RDS and a 3-year EC2 Instance Savings Plan (no upfront).

NameSummaryRegionUpfront costMonthly Cost
Amazon VPCNumber of NAT Gateways (2) DT Inbound: Internet (1 TB per month), DT Outbound: Internet (1 TB per month), DT Intra-Region: (0 TB per month), Data transfer cost (92.16)US East (Ohio)0.00 USD166.86 USD
Amazon EKSNumber of hybrid nodes (0 per month), Number of EKS Clusters (1)US East (Ohio)0.00 USD73.00 USD
Amazon EC2 / EBSTenancy (Shared Instances), Operating system (Linux), Workload (Consistent, Number of instances: 4), Advance EC2 instance (m5.xlarge), Pricing strategy (EC2 Instance Savings Plans 3yr No Upfront), Enable monitoring (disabled), EBS Storage amount (128 GB), DT Inbound: Not selected (0 TB per month), DT Outbound: Not selected (0 TB per month), DT Intra-Region: (0 TB per month)US East (Ohio)0.00 USD283.32 USD
Amazon Route53Hosted Zones (1), Additional Records in Hosted Zones (10), Basic Checks Within AWS (10)US East (Ohio)0.00 USD10.91 USD
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQLStorage amount (80 GB), Storage volume (General Purpose SSD (gp2)), Nodes (1), Instance Type (db.m6g.2xlarge), Utilization (On-Demand only) (100 %Utilized/Month), Deployment Option (Multi-AZ), Pricing Model (Reserved), Lease Offering Term (3yr), Purchase Option (Partial Upfront)US East (Ohio)6854.00 USD*296.38 USD
Elastic Load BalancingNumber of Application Load Balancers (1)US East (Ohio)0.00 USD39.79 USD
AWS Secrets ManagerNumber of secrets (20), Average duration of each secret (30 days), Number of API calls (100 per month)US East (Ohio)0.00 USD8.00 USD
Monthly Costs878.26 USD

Taking the monthly costs and upfront costs, we can examine the year 1, 2 and 3 costs shown in the following table.

NameUpfront CostsAnnual Costs
Year 1 Costs6854.00 USD17393.12 USD (Includes upfront cost)
Year 2 Costs10539.12 USD
Year 3 Costs10539.12 USD

*NOTE: Upfront cost for the Amazon RDS instance means you pay $6854.00 when starting up the database to receive the 3-year Reserved Instance pricing of $296.38 per month.