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Keeping Your Cloud Costs Under Control
Tech writer David Strom offer this in-depth article on keeping your cloud costs suppressed. He writes: "Some cloud providers don’t make pricing available until you sign up for their service. Others hide pricing schedules behind complex formulae. And therein lies the challenge for an IT manager who wants to try to find the best-priced cloud: you have to read the fine print, and make sure you understand what is billable, how it is measured and priced, and when the meter starts (and stops) running. Let’s look at where you can get more precise cost information, as well as examine a few of the growing number of third-party comparison services that can help you get more control over your cloud costs."
Just don't use Cloudera and you can double your number of nodes.
Head on over to their monthly calculator to work out how much you'll be spending with them if you decide they are right. Would you go to do your grocery shopping and only find out how much each item you have bought is at the cashier? I think not...
I noticed that Amazon charges per hour, but I'm wondering if this is wall-clock time, or CPU-usage time? In other words, do I pay if the virtual instance is running but the CPU is idle?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
You know what's really budget-friendly? Use a cheap, poorly managed cloud service that crashes all the time like Amazon's or Microsoft's lol. You know how expensive proper electrical backup equipment and programmers who know what they're doing are? Lol, anyway the real truth is you can look into it all day and get verified, guaranteed quotes and think you're set. Then, once they have your data and your pricing guarantee period or contract or whatever expires, there's no stopping them from raising the price to whatever they want now that they have your data. And do they have to allow you to export all your data to switch services? Hell no!
There's an oligopoly and its pricing strategy is confuseopoly? There's a first (said in intensely ironic tone of voice)
Find me an oligopoly without a confuseopoly pricing system, if you can. Cell phones? Check. Automobiles? Check. Now that almost all banks are owned by a couple big new york banks... check... Long distance providers (remember those?) ... Check...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Host locally and don't give up control of your stuff.
fuck this, I'll just stick with subreddits.
what about casino time where a day starts at 3am
Increase in size of Internet connection to the office.
We switched to the cloud expecting it but many IT departments dont think of the impact.
5-10 people syncing to hosted services and other onlne apps is one thing, when you have all 6900 employees doing it, it will utterly CRUSH that wimpy T3 you have.
And no, you cant use the garbage DSL or Cable modems. You need a real connection. we are buying an OC3 connection here to have upstream and downstream to be 100% reliable. and luckily we have fiber to the building already and a local POP is cheap enough that we are only spending a little more than 2X of what we were spending on the T3. We do have a business class Cable service as a failover backup.
When you scale up with "cloud" you can saturate a internet connection quite fast.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Hooker Standard Time is treated exactly the same as any other time zone.
I looked at this and thought "this has SlashBi written all over it". Turns out it's actually part of SlashCloud. I must have missed the memo. When did that show up? And are we we going to get more SlashBuzzwords?
It seems like anything that is somewhat expensive, you cannot find an estimate of your final price online. You need sales people to give you a quote, then you are stuck with hearing there sales pitch and them getting annoyed when you say no.
I understand that a lot of things are variable prices... However I want to know the ball park price. Am I looking at $10,000 or $100,000 or under $5,000?
For example... The following I would like to have a ball park figure on, in my area...
1. How much for Solar Panel? How much energy will they provide... On the average for an average size home.
2. How much for Geothermal?
3. How much for Central Air Conditioning?
4. How much for enterprise software?
The problem isn't just the Companies fault, it is the customer too... Most customers are too stupid to realize there are factors, and they just don't know what an estimate means, so the companies are afraid of posting their estimated prices online because too many people think the online estimate is a quote or a contactable price. Also they will have to compete with companies who give their estimates differently, difference companies may deal with different size customers. You quote for an enterprise system, company may say a mid sized company is 100 employees an other will think it is 1000 employees. so their estimates will be orders of magnitudes off. Also there is sometimes the case you get what you pay for... Too cheap you get cheap.
While I understand the complication... I would wish there was a place where I can get an honest estimate.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
the same lessons still apply even if you change the name to "cloud".
This is following a similar arc that the mainframe to PC story followed. Sadly, the people who are old enough to remember it are retiring, and the younger people who have not studies computing history are too ignorant to see it.
The "cloud" nonsense is repeating history, and will have easily predictable outcomes. We will eventually be heralding the arrival of the "new" technology that allows us to have control over our own computing (but with laws that have to be circumvented or repealed due to Government totalitarianism).
I can't help by shake my head in disbelief.
... if it has root shell access over ssh (e.g. that command line that all the New Linux geeks hate so much).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I remember the transition from "green-screen" dumb-terminals on IBM mainframes &/or midranges (VAX VMS driven ones too just before it) - the transition to Client-Server computing using MANY cheaper PC's & better equipped servers (more disk, more RAM, sometimes better CPU depending on what kind of server it was running (DB engines come to mind here on that account)) was because it was cheaper...
Now it's EXACTLY what you're stating... except that now that PC Client-Server designs beat the hell out of buying a full-blown mainframe (& possibly midranges too), they want to "centralize" it... but to save CO$T$ in ANOTHER WAY:
Personnel...
APK
P.S.=> This isn't designed like "the war on drugs" people - that keeps law enforcement people @ WORK... Oh no, but this?
This "cloud computing initiative" is designed to PUT YOU TECHS OUT OF WORK, period (nobody's going to tell me otherwise, because it takes people locally to support Client-Server designs, but not as many locally, for "Cloud" computing).
By the by/lastly: The term "Cloud"? It's been used FOREVER by the IBM types... I was first exposed to it back circa 1994 or thereabouts! apk
He writes: "Some cloud providers don’t make pricing available until you sign up for their service. Others hide pricing schedules behind complex formulae
So what you're saying is by going with the "cloud" your money could end up disappearing into thin air.
OK, I'll get my coat.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Seems to me, the cloud based business model - overcharging your customers to lose their data from your server - was fine as long as they would pony up the money.(and agree to the zero liability terms)
Now that (non)economies of scale are proving too hard to keep the pictures of last summer's vacation from vanishing into the ether, it's time to reconsider allowing the end user to buy your app and worry about their own data.
These days virtualization makes provisioning cloud services easy even for the relative novice. Two co-located physical servers hosting numerous virtual machines each providing a specific service can be achieved at very low cost, primarily the cost of co-location. I control the services. I control the software installed. I control the applications and data. In fact, my co-location costs merely the price of an Internet connection at my home office and another at my office, with a third server at another location. If any service goes down I am notified via SMS and can simply update the public DNS record(s).