People must be aware of the costs associated with Veeam Backup for AWS and try to manage them. Be aware of it because this is a sudden cost and a surprising cost - what I would say is a hidden cost. Usually, people think that backup can go through gateways and S3 gateways. That is reducing the cost and not going to the internet to an S3 bucket. S3 gateway definitely allows you the transfer cost reduction. When we say the API call to the S3 bucket, it means the push, pull, delete, and modification. Every time a backup happens and if it is a really long-running process or every time you are restoring an application-aware backup, people should be aware of what they are exactly restoring. It is not the same as on-premises because for on-premises, there is no such cost for restoring or backup. In the cloud, there is definitely a cost with respect to the data transfer and API calls. These are hidden costs where many people are not aware. Someone should really be aware of it. Veeam's integration with AWS IAM for role-based access control is adequate. AWS requires Veeam to always have their script or the requirements of what they actually require for such backup types. When we take an account level or usually what we have done is we usually keep one backup server in a centralized location and from there we run these backup jobs. Those kinds of configuration and network configuration need to be there, and the IAM-level policy should be there. They need three types of major policies such as EC2-related, disk-related, and network-related items. It is a huge list of a JSON file that Veeam also provides. Some of them are usually not there. Once you run those backups and all when it gets failed, the VDA also gives you the option of what it is missing. Then you can go ahead and update that one. It is not that hard, but someone who is really aware of backup as well as cloud knowledge and having extensive cloud knowledge can fix this. It is not a big deal. Regarding Veeam's backup cost calculator, I would say it does not help with calculating the application-aware backup cost. The number of API calls it is going to make depends on the frequency of backup and whether you are going to take a full backup or an incremental backup. The way Veeam works, there is a feasibility to take what we say an incremental backup and they sync. There are two types: one is a fully aware backup that takes a whole complete copy of your instance, and the incremental combines and has created the full copy. If that is the case and you are taking a big chunk or your server size or your disk size is almost around TB territory, and you are taking an application-aware backup such as SQL or any application-aware backup, then that is definitely going to increase your cost.
