awspricer

You don't want to negotiate the price of simple things you buy every day. -Jeff Bezos

doveryai no proveryai (trust, but verify) - Ronald Reagan

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In 2015, the Federal Aviation Administration signed a multiyear partnership with CSGov to provide brokered hybrid cloud services, including public and government community cloud services brokered from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

In order to verify the cost effectiveness of the contract vehicle, the FAA developed awspricer to be able to dynamically build a spreadsheet of market rates for cloud services in the AWS GovCloud region.

To ensure that the package can be run by non-technical personnel on a standard FAA workstation, awspricer is written in PowerShell.

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What it does

awspricer.ps1 queries the public AWS Price List Bulk API (no AWS account or credentials required) and extracts EC2 Reserved Instance pricing for the AWS GovCloud (US) regions. By default it captures the 1-year, All Upfront, standard offering-class rate for every instance configuration and writes them to govcloud-ec2-pricing.csv.

Requirements

• Windows PowerShell 5.1 or PowerShell 7+ (no extra modules).
• Outbound HTTPS access to pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com.
• ~250 MB free disk per region for the cached price file.

Usage

# Both GovCloud regions, 1yr All Upfront standard RIs -> govcloud-ec2-pricing.csv
.\awspricer.ps1

# One region, include convertible + standard, custom output file
.\awspricer.ps1 -Regions us-gov-west-1 -OfferingClass all -OutputPath west.csv

# A different term (whitespace-insensitive matching)
.\awspricer.ps1 -LeaseContractLength 3yr -PurchaseOption "Partial Upfront"

Run Get-Help .\awspricer.ps1 -Full for all parameters.

Output columns

SKU, Region Code, Location, Product Family, Tenancy, Instance Type, Instance Family, # virt cores, Host CPU, Host CPU Clock Speed, Memory, OS, License, Bundled SW, Offering Class, Lease, Purchase Option, Upfront Cost (1yr), Per Month Cost

For All Upfront RIs the whole term cost is the single Quantity ("Upfront Fee") price dimension; Per Month Cost is that figure divided by 12. Note that some rows are Product Family = "Dedicated Host" (priced per host, with Tenancy = Reserved) rather than per-instance — the column makes them easy to filter.

2026 modernization notes

The original 2016 script no longer ran against today's API. This version fixes:

1. Per-region files instead of the 8.6 GB monolith. The full AmazonEC2 offer file is now ~8.6 GB and cannot be parsed on a normal workstation. We use the per-region offer file (~200 MB CSV) discovered via the currentRegionIndexUrl index that AWS added after 2016.
2. Both GovCloud regions. The single "AWS GovCloud (US)" location the original filtered on no longer exists; pricing is now published per region as "AWS GovCloud (US-West)" (us-gov-west-1) and "AWS GovCloud (US-East)" (us-gov-east-1).
3. Tolerant term matching. AWS now ships mixed value formats in the same file ("1yr"/"1 yr", "All Upfront"/"AllUpfront"); matching is whitespace-insensitive so no offers are silently dropped.
4. OfferingClass. The standard vs convertible distinction (added after 2016) is surfaced as a column and selectable via -OfferingClass.