I just read a story on The Register where a Google executive says that it makes no financial sense to use utility based cloud computing services such as Amazon or Azure. I’ve been saying this for 2 years. I’m out of the cloud business and have no vested interest any more and I still say this.
Unpredictable Costs
Let’s forget the certain people out there who claim that heaven resides in an Amazon data centre and that the costs are predictable. The truth is that the only thing predictable about your end of month bill will be that you’ll have no idea what it will be.
Here’s Amazon E2C pricing (Ireland data centre):
|
Standard On-Demand Instances |
Linux/UNIX Usage |
Windows Usage |
|
Small (Default) |
$0.095 per hour |
$0.12 per hour |
|
Large |
$0.38 per hour |
$0.48 per hour |
|
Extra Large |
$0.76 per hour |
$0.96 per hour |
|
High-Memory On-Demand Instances |
||
|
Extra Large |
$0.57 per hour |
$0.62 per hour |
|
Double Extra Large |
$1.34 per hour |
$1.44 per hour |
|
Quadruple Extra Large |
$2.68 per hour |
$2.88 per hour |
|
High-CPU On-Demand Instances |
||
|
Medium |
$0.19 per hour |
$0.29 per hour |
|
Extra Large |
$0.76 per hour |
$1.16 per hour |
OK …. not so bad so far. You can tell how many hours there are in a month and can budget for that. Don’t be fooled. That’s just the start of it.
Here’s the bandwidth-out costs (starting in November 2010):
|
Data Transfer Out |
US & EU Regions |
|
First 1 GB per Month |
$0.00 per GB |
|
Up to 10 TB per Month |
$0.15 per GB |
|
Next 40 TB per Month |
$0.11 per GB |
|
Next 100 TB per Month |
$0.09 per GB |
|
Over 150 TB per Month |
$0.08 per GB |
Do you know how much bandwidth will be going out from your web/application servers to the net? We’re getting into finger-in-the-air territory now.
More charges exist for licensing, storage, etc.
Azure pricing is more nuts. It makes choosing a mobile phone plan look easy.
I dare you to give me a guaranteed price for a web server and database server on either platform on a monthly basis, that will be good for a year, and then be able to stand over that prediction.
Management Isn’t Reduced That Much
One of the ideas of cloud computing is to get rid of all the management. I’ve got some news for you: you might not have physical machines to look after any more but you still have virtual machines running Linux or Windows to look after if on Amazon E2C. Amazon do not look after your operating systems or applications. You have to do it. You have to lock them down. You have to patch them. You have to maintain them. I’m betting there’s no OS upgrade option either!
Supplier Lock-In
I’m looking squarely at Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) here, including Azure. Say you get ticked off with the unpredictable pricing of MS Azure. Or maybe you want to move to another hoster. How do you do that right now? You can’t just take your application and data and put them on a virtual machine in another hosting company because the thing is completely tied into Azure. That’s only going to increase with the rumoured Orleans cloud development model that is on the way.
At least with Amazon, you develop on a familiar Windows/LAMP stack and can port your application and data to another Windows/LAMP machine with another hoster. OVF might even open up the possibility of being able to just move a VM.
The answer from MS might be Azure appliance. I’m not buying into that. That’s going to be a very limited product and will limit your purchasing options.
What To Do?
My advice is that you go with a platform that is available with many vendors and that has a fixed monthly cost based on hard and predictable sizing if you are putting together a production system that will be used 100% of the time. Services such as Amazon E2C and MS Azure are great for temporary solutions, e.g you need temporary web or computing capacity but their unpredictable charges make them a financial nightmare.