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."

Re:how it really works

[Vrtigo1]

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.