Baseline Infrastructure & Cloud Usage Estimate
Baseline Infrastructure
- Cloud Provider: AWS (primary), with multi-cloud/pluggable support in roadmap
- Core Services:
- Amazon ECS/EKS (container orchestration)
- S3 (object storage)
- RDS/Postgres (relational DB, vector DB via pgvector)
- Lambda (serverless tasks)
- CloudWatch (logging/monitoring)
- VPC, Security Groups, IAM (networking/security)
- Bedrock (GenAI/LLM)
- SQS/SNS (eventing/notifications)
- Secrets Manager (secrets management)
- DevOps:
- GitHub Actions (CI/CD)
- Poetry/Nox (Python env & automation)
- Docker Compose (local/dev)
Cloud Usage Estimate (MVP Phase)
All pricing is estimated in South African Rand (ZAR/R), based on AWS public pricing as of July 2025. Actual costs may vary by region, usage, and discounts. Exchange rate used: 1 USD ≈ R18.50.
| Service/Resource | Usage/Notes | Unit Price (R) | Monthly Qty | Est. Monthly (R) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Compute | 2-3 t3.medium EC2/ECS/EKS nodes (24/7) | R1,200/node | 2.5 | R3,000 |
| Storage: S3 | 100GB (Standard) | R0.45/GB | 100 | R45 |
| Storage: RDS/Postgres | 50GB + db.t3.medium (HA) | R1,400/inst | 1 | R1,400 |
| Storage (50GB) | R0.50/GB | 50 | R25 | |
| Networking | 1TB egress | R1.80/GB | 1,000 | R1,800 |
| Bedrock/LLM | 100K tokens (pilot) | R0.15/1K tokens | 100 | R15 |
| Monitoring | CloudWatch (basic) | R200 | 1 | R200 |
| Lambda | 100K invocations | R0.40/1K | 100 | R40 |
| SQS/SNS | 1M messages | R0.08/10K | 100 | R8 |
| Other (IAM, VPC, etc) | Misc. baseline infra | - | - | R150 |
| Support/Buffer | Unforeseen, price fluctuation | - | - | R300 |
| Total (Est.) | R6,991 |
Notes:
- Compute: t3.medium on-demand, average 2.5 nodes (mix of ECS/EKS/EC2)
- RDS: Single db.t3.medium instance, 50GB storage, multi-AZ not included
- S3: Standard storage, excludes infrequent access/archive
- Networking: 1TB egress, intra-AWS traffic not included
- Bedrock/LLM: Based on pilot usage, may increase with scale
- Lambda/SQS/SNS: Within free tier for most months, but included for buffer
- Support/Buffer: For minor services, price changes, or overages
DevOps
- CI/CD: GitHub Actions for automated testing, build, and deployment
- Infrastructure as Code: Terraform (planned), AWS CDK (roadmap)
- Secrets Management: AWS Secrets Manager, GitHub OIDC
- Containerization: Docker, Docker Compose for local/dev
- Monitoring & Alerting: CloudWatch, custom dashboards, Slack/Teams integration (future)
- Automated Security Scans: Dependabot, Trivy (container scanning)
MLOps
- Experiment Tracking: MLflow (planned), Weights & Biases (optional)
- Model Registry: MLflow Model Registry (future)
- Model Deployment: CI/CD integration for model serving (ECS/EKS, Lambda)
- Data Versioning: DVC (Data Version Control) or S3 versioning
- Automated Retraining: Scheduled retraining pipelines (future)
- Monitoring: Model drift, data quality, and performance monitoring (roadmap)
Next Steps
- Set up cost monitoring and alerting
- Proceed to: Address ethics, safety, and compliance requirements in the Checklist