Why Cloud Infrastructure Pricing Is Absurd

itwbennett writes "Two reports out this week, one a new 'codex' released by 451 Research and the other an updated survey into cloud IaaS pricing from Redmonk, show just how insane cloud pricing has become. If your job requires you to read these reports, good luck. For the rest of us, Redmonk's Stephen O'Grady distilled the pricing trends down to this: 'HP offers the best compute value and instance sizes for the dollar. Google offers the best value for memory, but to get there it appears to have sacrificed compute. AWS is king in value for disk and it appears no one else is even trying to come close. Microsoft is taking the 'middle of the road,' never offering the best or worst pricing.'"

Comments

Don't forget hidden costs

[i_hate_robots]

Every time I read these types of articles, I feel like implementation cost is always ignored. Sure, maybe I get some extra compute for my dollar here, or some extra memory there, but how long did it take to integrate this solution using a given vendor's APIs and services? How easily can I script scale-up and scale-down policies? How effective are those scaling policies at actually saving me resources and money? I think this is kind of an old-fashioned way of calculating infrastructure pricing - it's more complex than just pricing out servers that happen to be somewhere else. Major caveat, however - it's awfully tough to calculate some of those intangibles accurately enough to put in a whitepaper...

Re:Sentence doesn't make sense

[ahem]

"compute" in a cloud context == "compute capacity". Think of it like first and last name. If I'm "Rob Jones", and someone calls me "Rob", it doesn't turn me into a verb.