Keeping Your Cloud Costs Under Control 85
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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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 thought thats exactly what happens in most of the US, what with sales tax etc added at the till?
Azure also has a cost calculator, here https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/ [windowsazure.com]
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Unlike pricing cloud services, you can apply a simple multiplier to the listed item cost to come up with the checkout price.
If grocery shopping was like cloud computing, you'd have to work out the can charge (unit cost * can units where 1 can is more than one can unit and is affected by size and weight of the can), stocking charge, checkout charge (per unit as affected by product weight and can units). Don't forget to compute the cart charges and floor wear (based on cart weight and feet traveled). Thankful
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Coincidentally, the Amazon cloud was down most of this weekend as their datacenter in West Virginia was impacted by this storm on the east coast. The datacenter I work in (also on the east coast) was not down. I've seen the amazon cloud go down quite a bit over the years. This is another thing you have to consider when picking your host.
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I just wanted to host an instance for a low storage, low bandwidth website and I could not trust that calculator. I could not trust the drone I spoke with on the phone. Since I didn't need the alleged power I now have a virtual server with capped cpu, memory and bandwidth on a host at a fixed price per month. I can't be charged more but the website could go dark during the month unless I approve the continuing charges for bandwidth. I feel good in avoiding the clowd clowns. It's cheaper than the price I was
Unit of time (Score:2)
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?
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Well, lets go look [amazon.com]
Man, that was hard.
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Great, now besides grokking this complicated pricing model, I need to think of stuff to do in the idle-time of my instance to get the most bang for my buck.
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You could help crack the password to my laptop.
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That wasn't so hard: password
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Nope. Close. But 1 letter off.
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So how about a (nontrivial) web-service that needs to be available 24/7, but is accessed on average only a few times a day?
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Or similarly, a process which is required to do something every brief once every 15/30/60 minutes...
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Re:Unit of time (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Don't forget the storage and network charges.
Re:Unit of time (Score:4, Informative)
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).
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WTF does "terminate-instance" really mean? Is it equivalent to "halt -p" or is it equivalent to "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda" ?
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You get billed until you stop the instance. Stopping is the equivalent of powering it down. Terminating is the equivalent of deleting it
Re:how it really works (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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There are already employers wanting to hire people with 10 years experience managing 10000+ cloud instances.
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I haven't spent much time with AWS docs, either. That's because I can't seem to find what answers my questions. So far this seems to NOT be a true virtual machine, or real machine for that matter. Things I'd need to know is how I can add a bunch of packages (need root access) and my applications ... and then CLONE it. Right now, we do this on real machines in a small farm. But it takes over 8 minutes to get a new box up and running. We're looking for something faster. But our cloning method is effect
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With an EBS backed root volume, take a snapshot, make volumes as needed and attach volume to a new instance. Or, make an AMI of the configured instance and make your instances from that new AMI.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2181849/ec2-instance-cloning [stackoverflow.com]
https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=47881& [amazon.com]
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For now I have dedicated and colocated servers. Each "instance" is a whole machine with full root access. In the case of the colocated ones I own them, and I have VNC/IP access to the KVM on them, with a flash drive plugged in, and can recover or reload easily.
If I can't get root access, then I can't run my custom app.
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Disclaimer: I work in the Ra
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Is there a way to play with a Rackspace Cloud to see how those steps work, just as a test w/o cost (no public access)? And of course, lots of documentation.
It would be great if I could build my own environment (a root tree), and configure a kernel, and make a gold master of that. I'd base it on Slackware.
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So they don't allow you to run rsync over ssh to make backups?
Oligopoly = Confuseopoly every time (Score:2)
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...
The most cost effective way... (Score:3, Informative)
Host locally and don't give up control of your stuff.
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True, but most of the downtime for datacenters are due to external events, such as lost power/internet connection.
And you can't really make the power company restore power to you, before they restore it to Amazon.
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Sometimes it costs more. It really depends on the situation. One thing it does is give you a better shot at a predictable cost month to month. Keep in mind you still need an admin for cloud services, Amazon takes care of their network and such, but someone needs to configure the virtual server once it's instantiated. If your server in the clouds gets slammed at 3 in the morning someone will have to put up another instance and replicate the configs. If the cloud goes down, someone will have to figure out tha
Article misses the BIGGEST hidden Cost. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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What are you transmitting over these local connections? Are you backing up the contents of your cloud instances every 10 minutes? Is your cloud instance mounting your local drive for data to deliver to the web? Or is it mounting the other way around where you are using the cloud as a file server?
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Well it does depend on what you're doing "in the cloud". If you're hosting web services in the cloud instead of in your office, it may lower bandwidth usage in your office.
But yes, people forget about bandwidth. I've run into a bunch of IT guys who are starting to make the argument, "Why pay all the costs for maintaining this internal file server when I can just use cloud storage?"
"Uh... yeah, because you have 70 people constantly updating 5 TB of data, operating off of a T1. Trying to do it all live o
slashcloud???? (Score:2)
I looked at this and thought "this has SlashBi written all over it". Turns out it's actually part of SlashCloud [slashdot.org]. I must have missed the memo. When did that show up? And are we we going to get more SlashBuzzwords?
Re:slashcloud???? (Score:4, Funny)
SlashBuzzwords
Stop giving them ideas!
Not just cloud. (Score:3)
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.
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I'm the CFH (customer from hell) that the sales people hate. I can describe the particulars and factors exactly, and then I expect them to pull a price out of their arse and be legally bound to that. Imagine you are a manager at a construction company and need a truck load of sand for a job, and the supplier tells you it costs 3.2 microdollars per grain of sand.
Reality pricing is better. Give case studies of what people actually do. Describe a web site run on a cloud, and include all the particular fact
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When you are in the business, you normally know what you are going to pay. You are usually already bound to the idea you will get this work done. So you want an accurate quote, not an estimate.
The problem is in the phase if you want to do the project or not and such a project is new to you, and you have no price expectations at all. Sometimes getting an estimate (without the formal quote) is useful.
Lets use a Car Analogy. Pretend we live in a world without car commercials... Or your TiVo skills have you
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But I want to determine if there is a real value to doing it yourself or just get someone else to do it. If the equipment costs $10,000 and labor cost $2,000 vs. having me do it, and risk injury. It may be worth it. However if the equipment code $10,000 and Labor costs $50,000 it may be better if I do it. But how do I know without an estimate.
just read up on mainframe problems (Score:2)
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It's just a hosting provider with a few more automation scripts added on and a "gotcha" pricing model.
And So It Begins (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
What old Linux geeks really want to know is ... (Score:2)
... if it has root shell access over ssh (e.g. that command line that all the New Linux geeks hate so much).
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It looks like they do this, but they do this BADLY. They allow firewall rules to specify which IP addresses can connect. This is bad for people on dynamic IPs. No idea, yet, if IPv6 is even supported.
What they SHOULD do is allow the user to change the SSH port number
, which is sufficient obscurity for the next few years. Hopefully, AWS will be blocking the various probers that try to dictionary attack the SSH ports, and help this situation.
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So then I do "sudo passwd root" and enter my random string a couple times?
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The default configuration of SSH is to only allow you to log in with your private key so you're still going to muck around with to allow password logins or get the root user a public/private key pair.
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Actually my preference is to put my public key in "/root/.ssh/authorized_keys".
So what you're saying is (Score:3)
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.
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As long as they don't have a usage cap facility that YOU can set your own limits on, in either computer based technical units of usage, or by dollars (even zero for the free tier), and in time frames other than just a whole month, then yeah ... your money could end up disappearing into thin air.
I should be able to set usage restrictions to, for example, no more than $10 in any one day, $50 in any one week, and $100 in any one month. Then at least I won't have more than $100 going into thin air. I'm paying
Not so cost effective. (Score:2)
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.