

Cloud Cost Calculator - snewman
https://www.scalyr.com/cloud

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snewman
There are plenty of pricing cheat sheets out there, but we couldn't find a
tool that would let us compare cloud providers while taking one-year or three-
year EC2 reservations into account, or answer questions like "who has the best
price per GB of RAM", so we built this. We'd love feedback -- what can we do
to make this more useful?

For more discussion and some interesting results, check out
[http://blog.scalyr.com/2013/11/11/cloud-cost-
calculator/](http://blog.scalyr.com/2013/11/11/cloud-cost-calculator/).

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jbigelow76
Why didn't you include Azure in the comparison?

~~~
snewman
We'd love to see more providers included, with Azure near the top of the list.
If you'd like to contribute, all we need is a static data file -- see
[https://github.com/scalyr/cloud-costs](https://github.com/scalyr/cloud-
costs). Or see [https://github.com/scalyr/cloud-
costs/blob/master/linode.js](https://github.com/scalyr/cloud-
costs/blob/master/linode.js) for an example.

~~~
potomushto
Just made it [https://github.com/scalyr/cloud-
costs/pull/6](https://github.com/scalyr/cloud-costs/pull/6)

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craigyk
OK, I read through the blogpost to read up on what "cores" mean. Is running a
quick benchmark on each instance a possibility? Even something relatively
simple and fast like geekbench. Also, if possible, test inter-instance
interconnect performance with some kind of MPI benchmark? I would be willing
to chip in to pay to collect this data.

~~~
snewman
We would love to collect data like this. It would be especially interesting to
measure the variability of network performance over time. (We did some
measurements of I/O performance over time a while back --
[http://blog.scalyr.com/2012/10/16/a-systematic-look-at-
ec2-i...](http://blog.scalyr.com/2012/10/16/a-systematic-look-at-ec2-io/.))

I don't know exactly what form this effort might take, but if you're
interested in discussing further, drop me a line -- steve@ our domain.

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kbar13
Linode's "cores" is greatly misrepresented. I'm sure the AWS/GCE/DO core
counts are equally misrepresented.

~~~
snewman
Yes, comparing "cores" across providers is an extremely sketchy proposition.
Obviously not all CPU cores are created equal, the motherboard and RAM
configuration has an impact, etc. Worse, there are a variety of different
models out there - reserved cores, CPU prioritization, bursting, etc. -- which
can't be summarized in a single number. Not to mention that performance may
not be consistent over time or from machine to machine, and on at least some
providers, supposedly-equivalent instances may be running on different
hardware with different performance.

We're open to suggestions here. For now, we've noted this caveat in the blog
post and in a couple of places on the page, and we deliberately didn't include
any sample queries that sort by cores.

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joshsegall
Linode gives you 8 cores even at the low tier. Granted it's at lower priority
but in practice I get way more than 1 core's worth of CPU.

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rpedela
I believe you have the wrong disk size for AWS cc2.8xlarge. It says 1.65 TB
but according to AWS it is 3.28 TB. I am assuming the disk corresponds to
instance storage not EBS. It also seems strange that disk GB per $ seem to go
down as you go from 1 year light to 1 year heavy on AWS. Shouldn't it be the
opposite?

Awesome calculator BTW! I really needed something like this.

~~~
snewman
Good catch on the cc2.8xlarge disk -- thanks!

As for the GB/$: by default we display prices assuming you'll use the server
24 hours a day for one month. That means that if you take a reservation,
you'll be reselling it a month later. It turns out that a 1-year light
reservation is best here (assuming you can resell for the full pro-rated
value): with a heavy reservation Amazon's 10% cut on the resale is too
expensive, whereas with no reservation the hourly rate kills you.

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sdfjkl
Nice idea, but needs more content. There is not a single non-US company in
that list (which should be a filter, because NSA).

~~~
snewman
We'd love to get more providers - would you be interested in adding some?
Instructions are linked from the upper-right corner of the page.

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grosskur
EC2 spot instances can provide significant cost savings if your app can cope
with them getting killed unexpectedly.

To help decide what to bid, I made a small app that continuously collects and
graphs historical spot prices:

[http://ec2price.com/](http://ec2price.com/)

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martypitt
Perhaps I'm misreading this, but the pricing for Digital Ocean seems wrong.

For example, the "Cheapest servers with at least 16GB of RAM" lists a Digital
Ocean 16GB server, 8 cores for $7.247/mth.

Looking on their site, I see that this would cost $160/mth.

Am I missing something?

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snewman
You clicked on a link in the "one hour/day" section. If you use the server for
one hour each day for a month, on Digital Ocean it will run you $7.247. In the
Presets panel, there are other sections showing rates for 24 hours/day for
three years, or 8 hours/day for three years. And of course you can put
together any combination you like by editing the form.

We did struggle with how to present all these options clearly without creating
a gigantic form. Suggestions welcomed!

~~~
martypitt
Thanks for the clarification.

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bpizzi
Great stuff you brought here, thanks for that. Did you think about giving some
clues on dedicated servers as well? Looks to me that "cloud" offers may be
convenient for a lot of use cases, but nothing can still beat the power/price
ratio of a good old dedicated hw.

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welder
DigitalOcean is the cheapest on the list. Has anyone used it who could provide
some feedback on network throughput, ease of use, etc?

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dhritzkiv
I don't have any data on network throughput or any other performance points,
but in terms of ease-of-use, it's incredibly straightforward to create and
manage your "droplets" (their name for instances). Lots of up-to-date
community articles and guides. Definitely recommended for a beginner.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Network throughput is pretty quick. Used a droplet to grab something off
bittorrent (no, not copyrighted content; just can't use bittorrent at the
office). Pulling down from the droplet was at a full 100Mb/s to our office.

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makeshifthoop
The cr1.8xlarge Amazon 3 year heavy utilization should be 660/month with the
upfront cost amortized over 36 months.

~~~
snewman
Yes, that's the figure you'll get if you set the interest rate to 0 in the
"Amortization period" section (and set the time period to 36 months).

By default, we assume a 10% cost-of-capital, which leads to the $706/month
figure you see otherwise for cr1.8xlarge over 36 months. The difference
reflects the fact that, all other things being equal, paying a lump sum up
front is generally less desirable than month-to-month payments. You can adjust
the interest rate parameter according to your situation.

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TallboyOne
It seems insane to me the header of the table doesn't 'stick' to the window as
you scroll. nice though

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akh
there's a few of these,
[http://www.planforcloud.com](http://www.planforcloud.com), awsnow.info,
[https://cloudvertical.com/cloud-
costs#cloud_costs/index](https://cloudvertical.com/cloud-
costs#cloud_costs/index)

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sheetjs
Is there some excel spreadsheet or google doc with all of this information?

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gsharma
Scalyr folks - Please make the header of the table fixed.

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cbsmith
What, no Joyent?

