The new product announcements are confusing, what is free now?

I was excited to see the announcement of Dremio cloud GA. I wanted to test things out to see what had changed since I was last working with Dremio a few years ago.

I was able to get an deployment set up quickly, kudos on the streamlined workflow.

A few things did confuse me a bit in the process. I was asked to select AWS instance types, and very quickly thrown into giving permissions for Dremio to make modifications to my AWS account and launch a “stack”. I could not get any clear indication through AWS if I would get charged for this, or how much. That’s largely on the AWS people, they have a well earned reputation for hiding the real cost of things until the billing date comes. The Dremio site says on just about every page how things are “forever free” now. So is this not launching instances and other resources in AWS that I will be charged for?

Is “forever free” just referring to Dremio licensing of the “standard version” without the fancier enterprise features and support? Am I getting charged for a bunch of AWS resources after I go through this setup?

Looking at the “application manager” for my “stack” it appears that this process only created some IAM roles, security groups and a bucket. So I guess it does look like this might charge me nothing, or just data storage costs in a bucket I control.

If that is the case, while I assume the workflow was something necessitated by the AWS side, this process should probably be clearer about the fact it isn’t launching compute instances I will be charged for. Especially as it asked me to pick instances sizes and then asked for permissions to do stuff on my behalf in my AWS account.

This looks very cool, but I’m fearful the messaging is muddled by this workflow stuff.

I haven’t tried Cloud yet, but we spoke to our account rep about it. Dremio Cloud is free, but the resources it uses in AWS are most certainly not free. Some may be, but ec2 won’t be.

Thanks for your feedback @jaltekruse. You’re correct that “forever free” refers to the Dremio Cloud platform component, and does not include the cost of any required cloud infrastructure, e.g. Amazon EC2 instances. We’ll make this clearer moving forward.