Cloud Cost Calculator: Gimmick or real?

The complex and closed pricing system has made the already crowded cloud computing market even more confusing. Some tools begin to "break ice", such as Cloudpricecalculator, SolarWinds VM to Cloud Calculator, Cloudorado, etc. But these are the gimmicks that "evaluate and compare Amazon EC2, Microsoft Windows Azure, Rackspace, and other public cloud pricing systems" through different strategies? Or is it real?

Have you been to the cloud computing Summit? Listened to the "cloud computing" topic introduction? Visited and visited the cloud service manufacturer's booth and listened to its exciting marketing and promotion? Great, you've figured out the desirability of "infrastructure as a service" overcomes the cognitive barriers between "cloud", "public Cloud" and "IaaS".

And then what? How do you pick a cloud provider or provider that fits your needs? First, you need to do a quick online search, which may take you a few hours or even a few days to confirm the possibilities of collaboration. But once you've delineated the players in the market, the next step is how to narrow down the list or determine how much the solution will cost the company's budget.

Amazon's EC2 often cite various cloud computing meetings. It is commendable that Amazon's cloud platform services pricing is open online. But the twist is that it often makes you feel like you need to learn a new language in order to effectively use the Amazon Cloud computing device on the web and get "real" pricing. Sometimes you even feel you should get a "degree" to help you accurately determine the relationship between the business needs environment and the required cloud computing resources and the ultimate cost.

Cloud computing's pricing turmoil is not just about Amazon. In fact, finding an alternative public cloud solution is usually not a problem. Fast searching on the internet often brings a large group of products/programs. However, after a click, you may find that these products/programs tend not to publicly publish their pricing, and always offer "give us a call" option, or offer pricing, but use its own (messy) pricing calculator, in order to effectively use it, first to learn and understand a set of new terminology or indicators to do.

What does cloud computing demand as an emerging market? A pricing system that makes it easier to compare various cloud services groups is needed to get rid of the current "fragmented" pricing mess. But it backfired. Now cloud providers are still trying to muddle through the pricing model and gain some of the advantages of business competition rather than working together to push the standard pricing model.

But don't get me wrong. I don't want to describe the picture of doom and gloom here. In fact, I think the situation has improved now. Though slow and imperfect, there are tools that have tried to "break the ice" to sort out the pricing strategies of these public clouds. On this "ice-breaking" road, there are three tools that are interesting.

Cloudpricecalculator.com

For its own pricing calculation, Amazon has proposed a "flexible unit of calculation or ECU" concept. A EC2 computing unit provides the equivalent 1.0ghz-1.2ghz CPU processor capability. However, this mechanism may not be suitable or will not be used by other suppliers.

Compared to the prices of other IaaS cloud vendors, Cloudpricecalculator.com says it has three features:

1. Amazon's ECU computing capacity is based on 1 ecu= PassMark. (cpubenchmark.net)

The 2.CPN (Cloud price normalization) index partly adds computing, memory, storage, and bandwidth, and is reflected by different prices;

3.gocipher creation provides domaingurus to replicate Amazon partial instances

Cloudpricecalculator uses a simple index to compare with other IaaS suppliers, whose CPN reflects the number of cloud resources, each worth 1000 dollars.

CPN can also help to clarify the problem of total price confusion between different components of different cloud service providers. For example, a company points out that its bandwidth cost is a significant monthly expense, with an average of 12-22 cents GB, depending on where the vendor is located.

While most vendors charge only external bandwidth charges, there are some to charge for inbound and outbound. There are indeed a number of charges, such as IP addresses or persistent storage that affect pricing. In addition, there are significant differences between different vendors, both in terms of strength of support and related costs.

Cloudpricecalculator.com

SolarWinds vm to Cloud calculatorsolarwinds vm to Cloud Calculator, this free download from the SolarWinds tool is interesting. Instead of inserting any number into the calculator, it attempts to calculate the cost of migrating private cloud environments to a shared cloud through predetermined rules.

VM to Cloud Calculator automatically inventory your virtual machine, capturing relevant information to generate related reports. It detects the approximate cost of virtual machines deployed in this environment by connecting to a specific VMware vsphere instance. For example, Amazon EC2, Microsoft Windows Azure, Rackspace.

Advanced settings allow users to display hourly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly costs, depending on how the enterprise handles its IT budget. You can also change the host location of the virtual machine, such as choosing to use a server on the east coast of the Amazon instead of its west Coast server, or you need a server in Europe or somewhere in the Asia Pacific region. Once your virtual environment changes, VM to Cloud calculator will also change to better reflect the enterprise's current VM inventory.

One of the details that has hindered the development of this tool is that only a limited number of cloud service providers are currently supporting its applications.

SolarWinds VM to Cloud Calculator

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)