Our first year in operation: $450M of cloud-spend forecast

It was one year ago today that we launched PlanForCloud.com, and what a year it has been. Since our launch, we have forecast over $450M of cloud spend, that’s over $1.2M of cloud spend running through our simulation engine every day!

$450,000,000

This massive number is a result of the thousands of users that we have, who use PlanForCloud to do some of the following:

1 - Understand Capex vs Opex
The change from purchasing up-front to the pay-as-you-go model has left many enterprises confused about how much they should budget for their IT on the cloud. Our users have been using PlanForCloud to model requirements and different growth patterns to see how much it would cost them if they were to move applications to a public cloud.

The Cost of Keeping your Application Running During Cloud Outages

Get a handle on costs for a range of outage proofing strategies for your cloud applications

Cloud outages happen.Over the last year, we continued to see highly visible cloud applications falter during the inevitable cloud outages. Cloud experts (including RightScale) and cloud providers continue to advise cloud users on strategies to outage proof cloud applications. RightScale customers use our cloud management platform to automate the process of outage proofing their cloud applications.

Cost is one of the factor that companies consider when choosing an outage-proofing strategy. However, cloud users often find it difficult to accurately forecast the costs across the entire range of options, from cold to warm to hot disaster recovery architectures. PlanForCloud is a free cloud cost forecasting tool from RightScale that helps our customers budget for different cloud usage scenarios, including outage-proofing. This blog post will cover the costs of different outage proofing strategies and show you how you can forecast the cost of outage proofing your own cloud applications.

This post will focus on disaster recovery (DR), the process, policies and procedures related to restoring critical systems back to normal after a catastrophic event such as a cloud outage. Later posts will focus on the costs of high availability (HA) architectures.

When thinking about your outage proofing strategies, there are a couple of things you need to keep in mind:

• Large scale failures in the cloud are rare but do happen and will continue to happen.
• The Application owner is ultimately responsible for availability and recoverability.
• There is complexity associated with different strategies, so you need to get the balance right between the effort and cost required and the risks you are willing to bear.
• Cloud infrastructure has made DR and HA architectures more affordable, however, there are still costs associated with it. We will talk about this in more detail below.

Types of Outage Proofing
There are a number of options when looking at DR, let's have a look through some of these:

Multi-Region Cold DR (most common)

Look at your current AWS resources and simulate future cloud costs

Now import AWS EC2 instances, EBS, S3, Snapshots and RDS instances into PlanForCloud and see future cloud costs

We recently announced a new feature that enables you to import a snapshot of your AWS instances into PlanForCloud so you can simulate and forecast future cloud costs. This feature was a great success with many of our existing users and new users starting to import their instances.

We heard from many of our users who requested the ability to import all of their resources into PlanForCloud, and I am very excited to announce that you can now import a snapshot of your AWS instances, EBS volumes, EBS volume snapshots, S3 buckets and RDS databases. We are releasing new features every few weeks, to keep up-to-date you can follow our twitter @PlanForCloud. If you would like to request a feature or give us any feedback, you can use our feedback portal. So what can you do now do with the new import feature?

1 - Compare Purchase Options (Reserved Instances vs On-Demand)
One of the main ways we have seen our AWS users reduce their cloud costs is by purchasing Reserved Instances. This is when you pay up front to reserve some capacity and in return you will get a lower hourly rate. However with Reserved Instances, there are two things you need to keep in mind:

• Break even point of investment: There are two different terms for purchase options, 1-year and 3-year; there are also three different utilization levels you can choose from (Light, Medium or High utilization). This creates a matrix of different options. You can use PlanForCloud to switch between different options to see which one makes sense for your enterprise.
• Upfront cost vs ongoing cost: With Reserved Instances, since you are paying an upfront fee to ‘buy a discount’, you need to look how how much upfront investment you will need vs how much your monthly costs will come down by. For many enterprises, due to cashflow, it does not make sense to purchase all your optimal RIs upfront; instead they choose to stagger their purchasing over time.