Cloud Cost Predictions for 2013

Predictions for 2013 from the leader in cloud cost forecasting, PlanForCloud

Overall, the last few weeks' events in which cloud providers entered a price war highlight the importance of upfront cost forecasting to help you compare deployment options. As part of that, you can do "what-if" style analysis to see how your costs would be affected by cloud provider price changes. Forrester Research's James Staten predicted a year ago how budgeting and planning for public cloud-spend is going to get more complicated in 2012. We saw this play out with constant price reductions, the addition of a big player into the market (Google Compute Engine) and new services from all the cloud providers. Here is a timeline of the events of 2012:

Cloud Provider price reductions 2012

Import from AWS into PlanForCloud to Streamline What-if Analysis

Already using AWS?
You can now import information about your AWS instances into PlanForCloud as a starting point for cloud cost forecasting!

We are very excited to announce that you can now import a snapshot of your AWS instances into PlanForCloud, forecast future cloud costs and do what-if analysis. Currently, the import works for EC2 instances, however we are planning to import from additional services (such as EBS, S3, RDS, Glacier etc.) and more cloud providers soon!

We have been using this feature for a few weeks internally at RightScale. Our own cloud usage has been growing quickly over the last 6 years and budgeting for next year's cloud usage can be challenging. We leverage many cloud accounts at RightScale to give our internal departments all the computational resources they need to do their job. Here are the three ways that we have used PlanForCloud:

1 - Assess different growth patterns
We started with a basic import from AWS for all of our RightScale resources. This gave us a snapshot of all of our instances (both active and inactive) across different regions. Looking at past year's data, we have identified a few growth patterns:

• Permanent growth patterns: We constantly need to provision servers every month to keep up with the demand from our users.
• Temporary peak growth patterns: When we add new features into RightScale and have publicity around it, we have a surge in users coming to check it out.

Let the Games Begin: AWS, Google and Azure Reduce Cloud Prices

The Cloud Price War Rages On

What a week! Last week was insanely busy for us; we were caught-up in the middle of what seemed to be a price war between AWS and Google which then spread to Azure this week.  In PlanForCloud we need to stay up-to-date with all the price changes so that our users can accurately forecast cloud costs.  The newest AWS and Google prices are live now.  The Azure prices updates will be added into PlanForCloud once they take effect next week.  We now have over 10,000 prices from various providers in PlanForCloud.

Analyzing the constant changes in cloud prices are just one of the reasons to use PlanForCloud.  When cloud prices change, you can simply click a button to re-run your cost forecast and determine the implications for your specific applications.

AWS, Google and Azure Announcement Timeline

Monday 26 Nov:

• Google announced 16 new instance types that have from 3.75GB to 52GB of RAM and from 2 to 8 virtual cores.
• Google reduced the price of its 4 original instance types by around 5%.
• Google introduced a new storage service called Durable Reduced Availability (DRA), which has a lower price by "trading off some data availability while maintaining the same latency performance and durability" as Google Cloud Storage Standard. The lower price is achieved by providing a more relaxed SLA in terms of availability but keeping the same durability levels; hence, this might be suitable for cost-sensitive applications or where some unavailability is acceptable.
• Google reduced the price of its original Cloud Storage Standard service by around 20%.

Tuesday 27 Nov - AWS kicked off their re: Invent conference in Las Vegas. RightScale was a platinum sponsor and various people were there presenting.

Wednesday 28 Nov - AWS reduced its S3 Standard Storage and Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) prices by around 25%.

Thursday 29 Nov - AWS announced 2 new instance types; prices for these new instance types have not been announced yet.

New AWS Cluster Compute instances

Friday 30 Nov - In response Google announced a further 10% reduction of its Cloud Storage Standard and DRA prices.

Wednesday 5 Dec - Microsoft announces it will reduce prices on Windows Azure cloud storage by 28% as of December 12.

Who is cheaper?
I hear you ask, who is currently cheaper? My answer: it all depends on your specific deployment and usage patterns (e.g. you might need to double your server count during Christmas or you might need 10% more storage every month). Why do I say this? Cloud providers charge for different things (e.g. storage size, read/write requests, data transfer), and use tiered pricing. So for example, if you use little storage but this storage is accessed many times, one cloud provider might come out top; while if you have more storage and access it less, another cloud provider will come out top, hence, it all depends on what you need.

If you have a scenario in mind, PlanForCloud is free - just log in as a guest to forecast costs for different scenarios.

Last week we also had three new team members join us in Edinburgh (Marc, Chris and John) AND moved into our brand-new office in the TechCube. Meanwhile, Alistair was working on an exciting new feature (import from your AWS account! more on that later), I was traveling between Edinburgh, Glasgow and Bristol giving guest lectures about cloud costs and spreading the word about us hiring more people, and Hassan, our product and marketing manager, was at the AWS re: Invent conference with the rest of the RightScale team in Vegas demoing PlanForCloud and RightScale. What a week...

-- Ali
Technical Lead, PlanForCloud