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."

Not with Amazon's EC2

[mysqlbytes]

Head on over to their monthly calculator [amazonaws.com] 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...

Re:Unit of time

[OverlordQ]

Well, lets go look [amazon.com]

Pricing is per instance-hour consumed for each instance, from the time an instance is launched until it is terminated. Each partial instance-hour consumed will be billed as a full hour.

Man, that was hard.

Re:Unit of time

[Mr. Sketch]

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).

The most cost effective way...

[Anonymous Coward]

Host locally and don't give up control of your stuff.

Article misses the BIGGEST hidden Cost.

[Lumpy]

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.