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

Forecast Cloud Support Costs on AWS, Azure, Google, Rackspace and SoftLayer

Support can be a critical aspect of a successful

cloud strategy, but how much will it cost?

Google vs Azure vs AWS vs Rackspace vs SoftLayer

If you have launched applications in the cloud, you have almost certainly faced questions that search engines can’t answer; questions which are very specific to your scenario. Getting the answers to those questions means accessing technical support from the cloud providers themselves, and this support often comes at a cost.

PlanForCloud is a free cloud cost forecasting tool tool that enables you to get detailed three year cost reports for your application on five public cloud providers.

We are very excited to announce two big news items:

First, we have added cloud provider support costs to PlanForCloud.  

You can now select different support levels from each cloud provider to see how much support will cost for your deployments. This allows you to get a more complete picture of all of your cloud provider costs.

Second, Google has announced their support offerings for users of Google Compute Engine

Amazon VPC Reserved Instances vs EC2 Reserved Instances

We wanted to shine some light on AWS’ reserved instances and 

how they work with Virtual Private Clouds (VPC) and standard EC2.

What is VPC?
Amazon’s VPC or Virtual Private Cloud lets you provision a private isolated section of AWS’ cloud and launch resources as you require in a virtual network that you define. When defining your VPC, you have control over your network including IP address range, subnets and network gateways.

Why use AWS VPC?
Being able to define your own network when launching EC2 instances gives you a level of security control which is required in some use cases. For example, you may not require all of your EC2 instances to be internet accessible (e.g. your database) - with VPC, you can define which resources are internet facing and which ones are not. You can also define which resources are accessible via other nodes (other EC2 instances or even other VPCs). Read more about transitioning to VPC.

If you are not familiar with reserved instances and how they compare to on-demand instances, read our blog here: AWS Reserved Instances vs On-Demand: Breakeven point

EC2 Reserved Instances vs VPC Reserved Instances

Useful Cost Saving Tips On The Public Cloud

The pay-as-you-go model of public clouds such as AWS, Azure, Google, Rackspace and SoftLayer can take some getting used to for companies adopting public cloud. Here are some tips that can help you avoid any surprises with your cloud provider bill.

First, it's important to know that you can start planning for cloud costs even before you have a cloud account or deploy your first cloud application.  PlanForCloud is a free cloud cost simulation engine in which you design a deployment and run it through a simulation engine to see how much different deployment options would cost.  This gives us a very unique position in which we can help our users to understand the pay-as-you-go model of cloud pricing for using infrastructure. Here are some general tips which can help you optimize your costs:

Prior to adoption

• Although server costs may be a big proportion of your costs, don’t look past other costs such as storage and data transfer.
• When you launch a server and attach storage to it, you will be charged both for the server running hours and the amount of storage you have provisioned.
• If you provision 100GB of storage, however only use 50GB, you will be charged for the full 100GB; so only provision as much storage as you require.
• Look at using different purchase options. AWS offers Reserved Instances, Azure offers 6 month and 12 month purchase options, and SoftLayer offers hourly and monthly purchase options. We will write a full blog about this subject in the weeks to come.
• Look at using different regions. Each cloud provider has multiple regions (or clouds as they are referred to here at RightScale). Some clouds will be cheaper than others.
• Pay attention to currencies and exchange rates.  Some cloud providers will charge in different currencies depending on which region you choose - e.g. the UK region might be charged in GBP, and not USD.
• Use specific features from the cloud providers which are aimed at solving your problem. For example, do not use S3 for long term archiving, instead use Glacier. Read our blog comparing AWS Glacier vs S3

AWS Reserved Instances vs On-Demand: Breakeven point

When deciding whether to use AWS Reserved Instances, 

evaluate the breakeven point in terms of months per year

AWS Reserved Instances are a purchase option offered by Amazon for their EC2 instances and their RDS databases. Instead of paying the normal hourly on-demand cost, you can choose to pay a lump sum upfront and get a reduced hourly rate. The upfront cost and the hourly rate depend on a number of different things, which you have to commit to at the time of purchase:

• Instance Size
• Operating System
• Region (e.g. US-East) *
• Utilization level
• Purchase duration

* Note that when purchasing Reserved Instances, you actually have to choose which Availability Zone within that region you would like to commit to.

Reserved Instance Utilization Options
There are two terms that you can choose when buying Reserved Instances: 1-Year and 3-Year. Each of these terms comes with three different utilization options:

Light Utilization: This has the lowest upfront cost, but the least reduction in hourly price. You will only pay for the hours which you have instances running.
Medium Utilization: This costs a little more upfront than Light Utilization, however you get a more discounted hourly rate. Again, you will only pay for the hours which you have instances running.
Heavy Utilization: This has the highest upfront purchase cost and gives the lowest hourly cost. With this option however, it does not matter how long you run your instances for, you will have to pay as if they were running 24x7.

Calculating Breakeven Points for Reserved Instances
In order to assess the breakeven points for each of the utilization levels, I have run scenarios through PlanForCloud for an m1.Xlarge (Standard Extra Large) on US-East running Linux for a 1-year term.  You will see similar breakeven points for other instance types (e.g. m1.medium or m3.2xlarge).

Here are the results, the breakeven point from On-Demand to Light, Medium and Heavy utilizations are:

AWS Reserved Instances breakeven points

AWS Data Transfer Cost Reduction - interesting note

It is interesting to note that the new Amazon Web Services pricing for

data transfer has technically not been reduced, but introduced

In the first price reduction news from one of the major public cloud providers in 2013, AWS have reduced their EC2 costs as well as their data transfer costs. They have also taken the opportunity to announce the rollout of AWS second generation instances (M3) to almost all regions.

PlanForCloud enables you to model different scenarios and run these through a simulation engine to get detailed cost forecasts. Since we run a simulation, you do not require any cloud accounts or cloud credentials to assess future cloud costs.

Interesting note about AWS data transfer costs
PlanForCloud holds the latest prices from the major cloud providers and this price change has brought something interesting about AWS’ data transfer pricing to our attention. The region to region pricing hasn't technically been lowered, it has actually been introduced at a lower rate than previously charged.

Previously, all data flowing from one region to another region was charged the same as if data was flowing out of a region. Now, AWS have introduced a different pricing strategy between data from one region to another and from one region out to the public internet. Essentially meaning that the cost of data out from region to another region being reduced for users by up to 83%. Although this is great news, it has added even more complexity into the pricing of the AWS cloud.