
Estimating cloud services costs in advance - myinnervoice
http://my-inner-voice.blogspot.com/2011/02/ubearable-lightness-of-being-trying-to.html
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alttab
Other costs of cloud services that rarely get factored in:

1) Down-time. The reason you go off premise is to out-source the worry and
responsibility. What does it cost you (in money, and time) when someone goes
wrong but your IT manager doesn't actually own the infrastructure to fix it?
The cloud provider has many customers, your IT manager should have one - _the
business_.

2) Ramp up. Has your IT staff or personnel used this service before? Are they
comfortable with the tools or have they used something similar? Doubtful, as
stable vertically integrated services are just now appearing.

3) Migration. Sometimes your migration path isn't as straight forward as
moving your applications into VMs and hosting them on a cloud platform.
Sometimes getting rid of an on-premise box means the difference between
Microsoft Exchange 2010 and G-mail. Besides the cost differences between this
example, all the meetings and coordination to make a switch are somewhat
invisible and I'd say that's worse.

Ultimately, someone who is responsible for running the technical
infrastructure of a business needs to understand what their primary problem
is, how their actions relate to the bottom line of the organization, and
how/when/why they would leverage a cloud platform. Only at that point would I
say looking at CPU/RAM costs matter.

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myinnervoice
Very good points yet a clear pricing tool should be open. The very mechanism
of jacking up pricing function of RAM is not visible. Look the amount of time
the Accenture researcher Huan Liu had to spend to come out with some data,
which are just some simple scenarios he had to assume to make sense. The same
providers can be anywhere from 19% to 500% the EC2 price. Such a wide gap is
simply not helpful. It is like saying that car costs anywhere from $100 to
$120,000.

