Comparing Public and Private Cloud Costs

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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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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