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Cloud pricing 101: A hotel room with a view
The billing method for cloud has often been described as being similar to that of electricity, with customers being able to access the resources they need, when they need them, on a pay-as-you-go basis. However, the reality of the current situation is very different. Electricity is charged on a standard unit of consumption for a standard period of time. All providers use this unit, so it is simple to compare these providers in terms of cost. By Dr Owen Rogers, Cloud Economist, 451 Research.
CLOUD, ON THE OTHER HAND, is a different story. Generally, all cloud providers offer a pay-as-you-go model, but they all charge in different units of consumption. Furthermore, a typical cloud application may have many components, all of which are chargeable; this is very different from the simple electricity model. Most cloud providers offer discounts for consumers who are willing to break away from the standard on-demand model, but these models vary between providers. How can consumers compare the options when there are so many?
Here I take a look at the different IaaS pricing models and the issues of comparing them. The traditional electricity analogy is a far departure from reality, so I am introducing a more comparable analogy to the hotel industry.
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www.dcseurope.info I Winter 2013 Why use a hotel?
Why do people use hotels? Generally because they need somewhere to sleep, but don’t want to build or buy a place of their own. Infrastructure as a service essentially works in the same manner.
When checking in to the hotel, the guest would typically state what room they want but would not be able to define every attribute of their room, such as the size of the window. This is typically the same model in IaaS. A virtual machine is the typical deliverable product of computing power in IaaS. When consumers wish to access a virtual machine, they must choose the specifications of that virtual machine. Most providers bundle resources together to make a virtual machine size. For example, an AWS ‘small’ virtual machine contains 1.7GB of memory, one compute unit and 160GB of local storage.
Consumers cannot change the components that make up the bundled virtual machine – they must either opt for a smaller or larger virtual machine product.
If the consumer doesn’t use all of the resources contained within the bundled virtual machine, then these resources are wasted. However, some IaaS providers such as CloudSigma and SoftLayer allow the consumer to specify exactly what combination of resources is needed.
Paying for your stay
If the hotel is huge and the guest has good credit, they can stay in the hotel as long as they wish. The hotel works on a pay-as-you- go model – if the guest has not checked out by 10am, they are liable for an additional whole night. Every month, the guest is billed
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