Sunday, July 18, 2021

Comparing Public and Private Cloud Costs

Comparing cloud costs between different environments can be complicated. Let’s look at the different factors that should be considered when comparing costs between clouds.   

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  2. Cloud Pricing Comparisons


IS IT POSSIBLE TO COMPARE COSTS ACROSS CLOUDS?

A listener was asking for some guidance on how to build some tools to help them compare costs across clouds.  

COMPARING COSTS IS VERY COMPLICATED, BECAUSE THE USE-CASES VARY SO MUCH.

  1. Not going to provide a definitive price/amount
  2. Not going to focus on cloud migration costs

Things to Consider:

  • How long will a project use the resources? (short-term vs. long-term)
  • How much will the project scale/grow, up or down? How frequently will it change? 
  • How complex is your project/application? How many components are involved? 
  • Are these centralized, shared resources or will they be used on a per-project basis?
  • How do you currently account for costs? What’s included? What’s not (typically) accounted for? (e.g. centralized services)
  • Do you have the ability to do various types of accounting for costs? (time, capacity, longer contracts, all-you-can-eat, etc.)?
  • How is networking accounted for? (traffic, traffic flows, speed, ports, volume, etc.)
  • How is the data center accounted for? 
  • Is a free-tier part of the expectation? Is a POC or Trial part of the expectation?
  • Can your project be connected to the public internet? Can you provide usage metrics to external groups? 

 

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