Windows Azure goes GA with big pricing announcement

Azure matches AWS pricing: Is it really the same?

Excited yet? We are! Today, our partners at Microsoft announced that Windows Azure is GA as of today. That means that customers can now combine the Windows Azure PaaS offering with the IaaS offering to cover a wide range of use cases.

What makes this announcement even more exciting from our perspective is that Microsoft is now committing that Azure will “match Amazon Web Services prices for commodity services such as compute, storage and bandwidth”. This commitment applies not just now, but going forward. This opens the game up for those price sensitive cloud users who until now have been led to believe that AWS is always the cheapest option. Azure starts this with a reduction of 21% to 33% for its on-demand compute instances.

There are a couple of questions which we need to look at and answer:

1 - Apples to Apples?

How do the services offered by both cloud providers match up? Do the servers have the same CPU, Memory and local storage?

I have mapped out the different Cloud Services compute from Azure below and have matched them up to the equivalent AWS EC2 resources below.

AWS vs Azure - different instance types

As we can see from the above data table, the normal instance types offered by both cloud providers do match up quite well across compute units and memory. AWS offers slightly more memory (10-20%) in all instances except Micro. However, Azure offers more storage by default.

When it comes to High Memory instances, if we compare the Azure A6 and A7 instance types to AWS’ Hi-Mem 2XL and 4XL, we can see that AWS offers both more compute units and memory. However, AWS offer additional instance types. Perhaps Azure will look at adding these instance types in the future. If we compare the Azure A6 and A7 instance types to AWS’ Hi-Mem 2XL and 4XL, we can see that AWS offers both more compute units and memory. 

We need to note that, although these numbers tell one side of the story, the other side comes from running real workloads to assess performance. This matters because your application may run perfectly on a small Azure instance, but may struggle on a small AWS instance, or vice versa.

2 - AWS vs Azure costs - do they really match?

Azure has announced that they will match AWS prices. We need to look at the public price sheets to see if this is as a given or if this is something you would need to request from Azure after you have got your bill and usage.

Lets look at the public price tables:

AWS vs Azure - exact same on-demand prices

The cheapest prices (On-Demand in cheapest region, running Linux) all match 100% between Azure and AWS. Azure has now thrown down the gauntlet, stating they want to be as cheap as AWS so that users do not need to ask the question - who is cheaper. This is a really interesting approach to take. If Azure was to reduce their compute prices lower than AWS, I wonder if AWS would follow suit?

Update: It is interesting to note that AWS is marginally more expensive for Windows instances by the third decimal point. For example, a large instance running Windows on Azure costs $0.36 per hour, and will cost $0.362 on AWS.

3 - What about Spot Instances or Reserved Instances?

There are other questions on my mind, such as what about AWS Spot prices or Reserved Instances? Although Azure offers 6 and 12 month purchase options, they are structured very differently from AWS RIs. With Amazon’s Reserved Instances, users pay an upfront fee for an discounted hourly fee. This is different to Azures two purchase options:

1. Pay Up Front: You can choose to pay a lump sum upfront for 6 or 12 months, and use resources as you need until you reach your spend limit. At the end of the period, anything not used will be forfeited. This option comes with a 22.5% to 32% discount compared to paying on-demand prices.

2. Monthly Commitment: If you do not want to pay up front, you can choose to commit to a minimum monthly payment for 6 or 12 months. If you use below the commitment level, then it is rolled over to the next month until you reach the end of the commitment period. If you exceed the commitment level, then you just pay on-demand. This options comes with a 20% to 29.5% discount compared to paying on-demand prices

This validates our view of a truly multi-cloud marketplace. One in which cloud providers would compete for different parts of your business and will bring different things to the table. The winners in this place will be organisations who are equipped to take advantage of features from multiple cloud providers.

By the way, both Azure and AWS have sponsored the RightScale Compute conference on April 25th and 26th, as well as Google Compute, Rackspace and others. I will be giving a cost budgeting workshop in which I will cover how to optimise on your cloud costs. See you there!

-- Hassan Hosseini

Product Manager at PlanForCloud

AWS Consolidated Billing Tips and Tricks

What is AWS Consolidated Billing?

Amazon Consolidated Billing is a feature provided by AWS for a user to group their bills from multiple accounts into one paying account. This enables enterprises to have a single paying account for their finance department, but still get a view of how much each sub-account has incurred:

AWS Consolidated Billing

Consolidated billing is purely an accounting and billing feature, meaning it is not for provisioning or managing resources. Also note that the paying account does not have access to the resources, the dashboard or the data in the sub-accounts. There is no cost for signing up to consolidated billing.

Why use AWS Consolidated Billing?

There are a number of good reasons why enterprises choose to consolidate their accounts into a single paying account:

From PaaS to IaaS: How we migrated off Heroku to RightScale

...and increased our flexibility and outage-proofing in the process

A few weeks ago, we moved PlanForCloud from Heroku, an-all-in-one PaaS, to managing it with RightScale. It was a smooth migration and we're very happy with our shiny new home in RightScale. In terms of cloud infrastructure, we're still using AWS, we've moved from a Ruby PaaS hosted by Heroku in US-East to an IaaS, and we chose US-West Oregon (with RightScale you can deploy to any cloud).

We used Heroku for our first year in operation and found it pretty good, however, we got to a stage where we started to outgrow Heroku. We wanted:

1. More Flexibility: ability to customise our stack, fine-tune our app's deployment process, get more visibility of our app's performance and be able to select instance types for different parts of our app. For example, we want to use high-CPU instances for our background worker processes.
2. Outage-Proofing: on Heroku, there is nothing you can do about outages; if Heroku has issues, you'll have issues, and you just have to wait for them to fix it. This is something we faced a few times in which the AWS US-East region had an outage and our entire app went down with it. With RightScale, we can control our deployment to a finer extent and can set up disaster recovery procedures which kick in as soon as any cloud outages happen.

Step By Step From Heroku to RightScale

Forecast HP Cloud Costs

PlanForCloud Adds HP Cloud to Multi-Cloud Cost Forecasting

There has not been a single cloud provider who can offer everything for every application and every user. Whether the focus is on cost, security, support or technology, each cloud provider comes to the table with a different offering.

With that, we would like to welcome HP Cloud to the table. HP Cloud servers, storage (both object and block storage), data transfer prices and support plans have been added to PlanForCloud. Here is the server selection page with HP Cloud selected:

PlanForCloud Server Selection Screenshot

AWS Reduces EC2 RIs an Average of 11%

Will RDS Price Reduction Follow?

Today, AWS reduced the price of its EC2 Reserved Instances. This applies to Standard (m1), Second Generation (m3), High-Memory (m2) and High-CPU (c1) instances. Cluster compute instances have not been reduced (cg1, cc2, hi1, cr1 and hs1). These prices only apply for users who purchase new Reserved Instances; old RI purchases are still on the old higher prices.

With these changes, AWS notes that on average RIs provide a savings of 65% from on-demand prices, so it’s even more important to make sure you are using Reserved Instances where appropriate. Check out our previous blog: Reserved Instances vs On-Demand: Breakeven point and use PlanForCloud.com - our free tool to help you assess costs of using the cloud.

Here is a summary of the Reserved Instance price reductions:

AWS vs Google Compute Engine Costs

Google Steps Up Its Game With 

Cheaper than AWS Support Plans

Last week we announced a new feature in PlanForCloud that enables you to choose your support requirements from different cloud providers and calculate your total cloud costs, including support, using the PlanForCloud simulation engine. This feature also includes Google’s recently announced premium cloud support plans.

This news has started to draw analysis of AWS vs Google support pricing. A recent article in the Register, Google in cloud-support price war with Amazon, Microsoft, stated: “This tariff model makes Google marginally more expensive than Amazon at low usage levels”, however, we wanted to find out what ‘low usage’ actually means - what is the breakeven point between AWS vs Google support plans.

AWS vs Google support plans
We chose to compare AWS’ Business level support with Google’s Gold level support due to their similarities - both have the similar response times and tiered pricing. Here are the results:

Rackspace Reduces Data Transfer Prices

Rackspace has announced a price reduction of 33% across their data transfer costs and a new tiered pricing model for their Cloud Files object storage offering (comparable to AWS S3):

Rackspace's new tiered storage costs

Previously, Rackspace charged a flat rate of $0.10 per GB per month, therefore this pricing model is designed to make it cheaper as you scale with Rackspace. As always, Rackspace gives customers completely free IOPS and transaction requests (READ, WRITE, PUT etc).

If you are considering AWS S3 vs Rackspace Cloud Files, you can use PlanForCloud to compare the costs. PlanForCloud is a free cloud cost forecasting tool that enables you to simulate and forecast future cloud costs.

-- Hassan Hosseini
Product manager at PlanForCloud