AWS - Pricing, Billing FAQ

UW-Madison AWS cost structure

The net cost to campus customers will be equal to Amazon's published rates for AWS, but will include a network egress waiver:

Amazon's current rates for individual AWS services can be found on Amazon's Cloud Services Pricing page
Amazon provides a cost calculator. The cloud team also likes some tooling like Gartner's Comparing Public Cloud solutions
The public cloud team can help with developing estimates, advising on cost effective uses cloud and monitoring and optimizing your spend. Contact the Public Cloud Team

Network egress waiver (costs for data traffic out of AWS)

UW's AWS contract has a a waiver for charges related to moving data back out of AWS, to help combat vendor lock in. This is through our affiliation with Internet2

The waiver is calculated based on University of Wisconsin's total AWS bill as an organization for all AWS services.

All network egress charges up to an amount equaling 15% of the total bill we be waived.

Example 1: If the UW's total monthly fees would have been $1000, but $50 of those fees were network egress, the final bill would be $950, as all network egress fees would be waived.
Example 2: If the UW's total monthly fees would have been $1000, but $150 of those fees were network egress, the customer's final bill would be $850, as all network egress fees would be waived.
Example 3: If the UW's total monthly fees would have been $1000, but $250 of those fees were network egress, the customer's final bill would be $850, as only $150 of network egress fees would be waived.

To be eligible for the waiver, an account must meet some basic requirements such as primarily using the Internet2 Network for connectivity. The account also cannot be used for specifically bandwidth intensive applications (e.g., media streaming or MOOCs).
Practically, this has meant most Internet2 schools do not pay egress charges the vast majority of their operating time. If you expect to need to move large amounts of data ( > 100s of TB in a single month) contact us for specific on the current waiver levels and data export strategies.

Business Level Support

Accounts that have opted in to Business Level Support, have a support charge based on 10% of Amazon retail spend

Internet2 Discounts

DLT, one of our campus resellers for AWS, discounts AWS pricing 5% as part of the Internet2 agreement with Amazon.
FourPoints, our NIH STRIDES campus reseller for AWS, provides steeper discounts for biomedical researchers, especially NIH-funded projects
UW-Madison Public Cloud applies a 5% overhead surcharge to the reseller rate (excluding any DLT Support charges) to recover a portion of its costs, including security & monitoring tooling provided to all accounts.
The net cost to campus customers will be not exceed to Amazon's published rates for AWS, but will include a 15% network egress waiver, so will typically be discounted

Free Tier

UW-Madison AWS accounts are not eligible for the AWS Free Tier.

Using Research Grant Funding for Cloud Services

Overview

Cloud computing (AWS, Azure or GCP) through UW contracts can be funded by research grant funds using a DoIT Number, like other IT expenditures (DoIT Numbers - Overview)

Customers are responsible for ensuring that any grant funds used to pay for public cloud services is done in accordance with Research and Sponsored Programs (RSP) policy and federal requirements (2 CFR 200 Subpart E). Basic guidance on allowable direct costs can be found here. It is recommended that any customers with questions about using a grant to pay for cloud computing contact RSP for guidance.

For customers planning or expecting to use credits/grants from a Public Cloud Provider, please indicate so on your account request, and contact the Public Cloud team to ensure those credits are deployed appropriately to your account.

Pilot Program - Reduced F&A Charges for Cloud Computing Expenses on Research Grants

UW-Madison is conducting a pilot that includes a reduced F&A rate for cloud computing expenses on research grants. This reduction applies only to new proposals and awards as of July 1, 2022. For questions about whether your funding source is eligible for this F&A reduction, contact RSP at: rspinfo@rsp.wisc.edu.

Contact your departmental grant/financial administrator or RSP to obtain a specific Project ID for cloud computing expenses that will be charged the reduced F&A rate. This will be a 7-character string, with letters and numbers, for example, AAA1234 and should include "Cloud Computing" in the Description field. Ensure you have the correct Project ID as changes may not be possible later.
Ensure that you have a DoIT Number tied to the specific financial account, including the Project ID
Sign up for a new UW Public Cloud account, indicate you are eligible for this reduced F&A rate, and enter your Cloud Computing Project ID and the associated DoIT Number in the form.

NOTE: if you are a researcher in the School of Medicine and Public Health and want to use the reduced F&A-eligible funding for computing on the Azure-based Platform X, contact platformx-support@mailplus.wisc.edu for more information.

Contact

If you have any questions, please Contact the Public Cloud Team

Billing

Customers can elect to receive a billing alert using CloudWatch whenever their monthly spend reaches a specified maximum value. Please note that CloudWatch billing alarms only provide a rough estimate of current monthly spend. They do not represent actual spend at any given point in time and numbers may be skewed due to reserved instance usage and service credits/grants applied to any account. To update the value associated with your account's billing alarms, Contact the Public Cloud Team

DLT and FourPoints bill UW-Madison at the end of the month following a billing cycle, however, campus customers won't receive a bill until the end of the following month (e.g., August charges won't be billed to a customer until October).

Additional details

AWS - Pricing, Billing FAQ

AWS - Pricing, Billing FAQ