Cloud cost calculators: Helpful or more cloud hype?

You’ve been to the trade shows. You’ve listened to the keynote presentations.Y ou’ve visited the vendor booths to hear the marketing and sales pitches. Great, you’ve figured out that infrastructure as a service has merit, and you’ve finally overcome the buzzwordiness of “cloud,” “public cloud,” and “IaaS.”

Now what? What cloud vendor or provider do you look at? If you do a quick search online, you can spend hours or even days going through all of the possibilities. Once you’ve identified the players in this market, how do you narrow down the list or determine how much the solution is going to cost your company at the end of the day?

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Amazon’s EC2 is often held up as the poster child of how to do cloud computing. To its credit, Amazon makes its pricing publicly available online. But the twist here is it can often feel like you need to learn a new language in order to effectively use the online Amazon cloud calculator and get “real” pricing. You might even feel like you need to earn a degree in cloud computing before you start trying to map out your environment and get an accurate estimate of what it will cost you in the end.

Amazon isn’t alone in cloud computing pricing chaos. You see, finding an alternative public cloud solution isn’t usually the problem. A quick search online will often bring up a host of offerings. However, after clicking on one, you might find that they don’t publicly post their pricing, but instead offer you the old “give us a call” technique. Or if they do offer pricing, they may use their own confusing pricing calculator that also comes with a set of new jargon or metrics to learn and understand before you can effectively use it.

What the nascent cloud computing industry needs is a reliable method of easily comparing various cloud offerings to one another in order to move beyond the current pricing chaos that exists today. Right now, these cloud providers are still trying to outmarket one another; because of that, there is no skin in the game for them to push for a standard pricing model. Perhaps chaos and confusion with regard to pricing is an added benefit for them in some strange way in order to get your business.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to paint a doom-and-gloom picture here. Things are improving. While they’re not perfect, there are a few tools attempting to clear away some of the fogginess of public cloud pricing. In fact, here are three interesting tools that you might want to take a look at if you find yourself going down this path.

CloudPriceCalculator.com

For its own pricing calculations, Amazon came up with the notion of what it called its Elastic Compute Unit or ECU. One EC2 Compute Unit provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0GHz-to-1.2GHz processor. But this unit may or may not translate well for other providers.

CloudPriceCalculator.com says it addresses three obstacles when comparing the price of infrastructure-as-a-service cloud offerings:

1. Translate compute capacity to Amazon’s ECU’s based on 1 ECU = 400 Passmark. (cpubenchmark.net)
2. The CPN (Cloud Price Normalization) index simply adds compute, memory, storage, and bandwidth and divides by price
3. goCipher created an offer at DomainGurus duplicating several of Amazon instances

The CloudPriceCalculator uses what it calls a simple index to compare IaaS cloud computing offers, and its CPN reflects the quantity of cloud resources that one can buy for $1,000.

The CPN also unwinds some of the confusion about total cost that arises from the many a la carte components of cloud offers. As an example, the company states that the cost of bandwidth tends to represent a significant monthly cost with vendors charging anywhere from 12 to 22 cents per gigabyte. While most of the vendors charge only for outbound bandwidth, some charge for both inbound and outbound bandwidth. There exists a range of other a la carte charges as well, such as for IP addresses or persistent storage that can affect pricing. And there are significant differences in the strength and cost associated with the various support offers from one provider to the next.

SolarWinds VM to Cloud Calculator

What’s interesting about this free downloadable tool from SolarWinds is that instead of just plugging in some arbitrary numbers into a calculator, it attempts to take away the manual guesswork involved with trying to calculate the cost of actually moving your existing private cloud environment to a public cloud. The VM to Cloud Calculator will automatically inventory your virtual machines and capture that information in a generated report. It does this by connecting to a live VMware vSphere instance and detecting all virtual machines deployed in that environment, mapping an approximate cost for running those VMs in three different public cloud providers: Amazon EC2, Microsoft Windows Azure, and Rackspace.

Advanced settings are also made available to allow users to display costs hourly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly depending on how the organization handles its IT budgeting. You can also change the hosting location of your virtual machines; for example, you may choose to use Amazon’s East Coast servers rather than its West Coast servers, or perhaps you need servers in Europe or somewhere in the APAC region. As your virtualized environment changes, the VM-to-Cloud Calculator can refine the estimates to better reflect your current VM inventory.

One detail holding back this tool is the limited amount of cloud providers it currently supports out of the box.

Cloudorado

Cloudorado is a price comparison service for cloud hosting providers. It could also be referred to as a price calculator for multiple cloud hosting providers, as the comparison is performed by calculating price for individually set server needs. The beta cloud computing price comparison engine currently only focuses on IaaS providers, but they are also working on a future PaaS (platform as a service) provider comparison solution.

This comparison engine uses its own approximation of Amazon’s CPU power measure: ECU. It uses this measurement of ECU for other providers as well.

What’s interesting is the simplicity of the tool. It uses multiple slider bars to set minimum RAM, HDD, and CPU requirements for your cloud server, and the online result table will update accordingly with monthly prices from multiple IaaS cloud providers. You can also adjust required transfer rates and specify the maximum length of a subscription plan you are willing to prepay.

In advanced mode, you can describe a configuration that consists of multiple server groups. The number of servers in each server group is derived from the size of a limiting resource (RAM, HDD, or CPU) that you specify for that group. The comparison engine then finds the best number and type of servers to fulfill this request.

What’s even more impressive is the list of cloud providers that it currently has in its comparison matrix, and they appear to be adding new providers all the time. In addition, it can give a breakdown of cloud provider by region: North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Not bad for a beta.

Vendors, analysts, company executives, and bean counters are all asking data center IT administrators to embrace the cloud. But without a reliable means of comparing cloud computing offerings to one another, chaos continues, and for many the cloud remains a tough sell.

With so many factors to consider when making a cloud decision, it’s no wonder why cloud computing services companies are being employed to help alleviate much of the complexity in the decision making process.

Are you ready? What tools are you using to help with pricing and decision making when it comes to the cloud and IaaS?

This article, “Cloud cost calculators: Helpful or more cloud hype?,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.