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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."
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...
It's wall-clock time. Even if your virtual instance is in the 'running' state but idle and doing nothing, you're still getting billed for it.
You're billed from when you do 'start-instance' to when you do 'terminate-instance'.
Regarding the partial hours, they are based on wall-clock hours as well. If you start your instance at 1:58 and stop it at 2:01, you will be billed for two hours: One hour for the 1:00-1:59 hour, and one hour for the 2:00-2:59 hour. I have a cron job that runs at :55 and checks for any instances I've started up, but I'm not using anymore and shuts them down (there is no point in shutting them down before then since I might end up needing them at some point during that hour).
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
I've been using AWS for almost a year and have been impacted by one outage so far. That's why they, you know, recommend you put things in multiple regions / availability zones, kind of just like you would before the cloud came to be.
They've had VM import for quite a while and just released VM export so you can take your EC2 instances and easily convert them into VMware images that you can download and run where ever you want.
They can certainly decide to raise their prices, but there is absolutely something stopping them from doing so: competition. In a free market you won't survive long if you are providing the same service as everyone else and charging more for it.
And as far as programmers who know what they're doing...I can see you haven't spent much time with the AWS docs or SDK. If you had, it would be obvious that they have some scary smart folks working there.
Plus bandwidth (incoming, between regions, etc), plus storage. Plus database size (if you use hosted one) plus dedicated IO for certain databases.. Plus Load balancers.. plus DNS queries.. Plus extra for their internal network with IPSec. minus some amounts if you purchase a "reserved instance". Then throw in just how much CPU is a "high CPU" Instance. And how does your needs map to that..
But your right. a witty one line answer to make the previous guy feel dumb is all you really need. Its that simple.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Host locally and don't give up control of your stuff.
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.
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.
SlashBuzzwords
Stop giving them ideas!
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.
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.