Comparing cloud costs between different environments can be complicated. Let’s look at the different factors that should be considered when comparing costs between clouds.

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SHOW NOTES:

  1. Cloudcast Basics - Cloud Economics
  2. Cloud Pricing Comparisons

IS IT POSSIBLE TO COMPARE COSTS ACROSS CLOUDS?

A listener was asking for some guidance on how to build some tools to help them compare costs across clouds.

COMPARING COSTS IS VERY COMPLICATED, BECAUSE THE USE-CASES VARY SO MUCH.

  1. Not going to provide a definitive price/amount
  2. Not going to focus on cloud migration costs

Things to Consider:

  • How long will a project use the resources? (short-term vs. long-term)
  • How much will the project scale/grow, up or down? How frequently will it change?
  • How complex is your project/application? How many components are involved?
  • Are these centralized, shared resources or will they be used on a per-project basis?
  • How do you currently account for costs? What’s included? What’s not (typically) accounted for? (e.g. centralized services)
  • Do you have the ability to do various types of accounting for costs? (time, capacity, longer contracts, all-you-can-eat, etc.)?
  • How is networking accounted for? (traffic, traffic flows, speed, ports, volume, etc.)
  • How is the data center accounted for?
  • Is a free-tier part of the expectation? Is a POC or Trial part of the expectation?
  • Can your project be connected to the public internet? Can you provide usage metrics to external groups?

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