How cloud services are billed

At the end of last month, a price war between cloud service providers was triggered by Google's mocking of the industry on March 27: A 32% drop in cloud computing prices, a 68% reduction in cloud storage services and a 85% drop in database services. After this big round of price cuts, Google's cloud service prices have been far lower than other competitors.

Google's uproar in the industry has produced a huge response, Amazon and Aliyun after a day to cut their own cloud service prices, and Microsoft announced a week later to follow up the campaign, the entire cloud services industry jubilant. Price cuts are a good thing, especially for the benefit of the consumer. Today's cloud service providers boast that their services are easy to use, but do you really understand how the cloud services are billed?

Several patterns of cloud services

The purpose of cloud service is to store the hardware and software and data of the enterprise to the cloud server so that the data can be accessed and calculated at any time and place using different devices. Cloud services are divided into IaaS, SaaS and PAAs, and four on demand, depending on the users and different requirements.

IaaS refers to the basic equipment, namely the service, the user is equivalent to renting a complete set of computer infrastructure, including servers and other equipment; PAAs refers to the platform as a service, cloud service providers will develop the platform as a service to the user; SaaS refers to the software as a service, the user is equivalent to the service provider through the network leased software, like our usual mailbox is a kind of SaaS.

As on demand, it is a pay-as-you-go model, the price is not fixed, in the peak demand price is very expensive, and in peacetime use price will fall, after Google cut the cost of cloud services, its on-demand price has become more than other service providers in advance booking a few years of price is also cheaper.

How does the cloud service provider charge?

In contrast to the simple and straightforward use of cloud services is its complex billing model, how much infrastructure you use, how many software, how long it takes, how much storage space you have, and how much you have allocated to the traffic. These are all factors involved in billing, and sometimes, like China Mobile, some inexplicable hidden costs are deducted.

In order to make the billing model appear concise, most cloud service providers are divided into cloud server, cloud storage and cloud application three parts, cloud server is hardware services, according to the use of time billing, cloud storage is based on the use of storage space billing, and cloud application is a continuous business.

  The good news is that after the price war earlier this month, the prices of various cloud services for Google, Amazon, Aliyun and so on have fallen by 30% to 70%, and cloud services are likely to reduce prices further due to lower hardware costs.