In the past we were using the VPN solution from AWS and even though pero hour seems to be cheap, the truth is the costs scale quickly when the whole team needs to be connected to it and we were an small team.

At some point I was investigating an spike on billing and this is what a I marked as possible improvement moving from AWS VPN solution to OpenVPN:

AWS VPN costs:

AWS VPN expenses

The service from AWS was working as expected we didn’t have any complain about it, but when we compare costs, using OpenVPN was way cheaper than using AWS VPN service. To have an idea of how OpenVPN works in terms of licensing they provide 2 connections for free and as we were paying yearly every license was $7/month.

OpenVPN Pricing

Configuring OpenVPN is fairly easy as you only need to pull the AMI from the AWS Marketplace, The marketplace provides you several options, from 5 licenses to 500 or even BYOL and pay for the licenses you really use as in our case we paid at first for 7 and then we increased to 10.

Besides the costs associated with licensing, we had to pay for the EC2 instance running the OpenVPN, this can run on an small instance, the only advice here is using an instance type with a high bandwidth. e.g. t4g.small provides up to 5 Gigagbits and r5.large provides up to 10 Gigabits.

The following table contains the expenses comparison:

EC2 Instance Yearly OpenVPN Licenses Yearly OpenVPN Total Yearly AWS VPN Yearly Total Savings
$222 $840 $1,062 $8,400 $7,338

A cool feature provided by OpenVPN is the SAML authentication which is more flexible and easier to manage, even Active Directory can be configured if you manage users in that way.

To sum up with this, the AWS VPN service performing perfectly for us but as we were accessing just a few specific resources it was convenient for us to make the migration, also it is something that can be set in 1 or 2 days.