

Show HN - Calculator that estimates your cloud costs - BDangIT
http://www.kloudcalc.com

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tomelders
Is it just me, or is could computing and the associated costs really difficult
to figure out?

I'm not sure wether this is something I need to know, or is it specialist
knowledge that server admins need to be on top of?

Maybe I'm dumb, but keeping up with all the software stuff coming out
(frameworks, libraries, best practices etc) is hard enough. Personally, I'm
struggling to figure out what's going on with hardware and could computing.

It's especially difficult when it comes to services like Heroku, where it
seems I'm expected to know about hundreds of these "things" with on-trend
logos and ambiguous names before I can feel like I've gotten anywhere near to
making an informed decision.

Or maybe I should shut up moaning and read more... but where's the time man!
WHERE'S THE GOD DAMN TIME! I"VE GOT OTHER THINGS TO DO!!!

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BDangIT
I feel your pain. I just attended a NoSQL conference this week and my head is
spinning with the amount of service providers and solutions there exists. One
day, I'd like to extend my calculator to include doing a full blown IaaS vs
PaaS comparo.

To answer your question, getting a good handle of knowing your operation costs
has happened after the fact your servers were spinning. Most of my clients
assumed that going to Cloud will help you save money. That has not been the
case and I had to keep calculating costs over and over again.

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ndemoor
Can you also add a daily (next to hourly) amount input? Because in our case
(and I guess other companies/users) a big chunk of servers is running non-stop
throughout the day and it is easier to get your mind around this figure.

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jabo
For Amazon AWS, I find Amazon's tool to be much more detailed:
<http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html>

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BDangIT
This was the source of my fustruation. I needed something quick and dirty to
share with my clients. While I could create a spreadsheet to do it and there
are a lot of them out there, I'd figure I just help others out there by
creating a simple app.

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alpb
It would be great to see Windows Azure costs on this calculator. Great job
indeed! People usually also use Cloud Storage services (s3 etc), maybe you can
do something for that.

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BDangIT
Storage has been on my todo list. It's been a little difficult to grasph since
AWS and Rackspace offer both block storage as well which charge differently
than just straight GET/POST/PUT operations.

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nodata
I'd like to be able to compare the same thing across providers.

e.g. what's the price difference between an AWS medium instance and the
equivalent on Joyent/Rackspace?

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okrasz
Try <http://www.cloudorado.com/> it does exactly that. You specify the
requirements (RAM, CPU, etc) and it finds appropriate options from multiple
providers.

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wgx
Suggestion: it would be nice to see RDS instances in here too.

~~~
BDangIT
This is also on the roadmap as well. Since I'm seeing the trend for Database-
as-a-Service.

