How to figure out what the cost implications (hopefully savings) of cloud computing are? There are as many different pricing models as there are players.
Price per service being not the sole decision criteria, is certainly very important. Most major players offer some sort of ROI calculator or cost analyzer. Here’s what Amazon and Microsoft provide.
Amazon Cost Comparison Calculator
The AWS Economics Center provides access to information, tools, and resources to compare the costs of Amazon Web Services with IT infrastructure alternatives. Our goal is to help developers and business leaders quantify the economic benefits (and costs) of cloud computing.
As part of the center they offer a couple of tools:
- Amazon EC2 Cost Comparison Calculator. A more or less sophisticated Excel spreadsheet ”…designed to help you quantify the direct economic benefits (or costs) of cloud computing”.
- The AWS Simple Calculator. A simple html based utility helping with understanding the basic cost structure of Amazon Services you might want to use. It also provides a few customer examples to get you started
Windows Azure Platform TCO and ROI Calculator
The TCO calculator enables companies to not only find out which Windows Azure configuration might be the best fit for they scenario, it also helps to figure out what this will cost and how this compares to your current costs.
The TCO analyzer is available from the pricing info web page for the Windows Azure platform.
Over on Rough Type, Nicolas Carr’s blog, he points to a document dated from March 30, 1965. In this document Western Union describes its plan to build “a nationwide information utility, which will enable subscribers to obtain, economically, efficiently, immediately, the required information flow to facilitate the conduct of business and other affairs." Sound familiar?
I love Nicolas’ conclusion:
“When the history of cloud computing is written, it may be that Western Union will play the role that Xerox now plays in the history of the personal computer: the company that saw the future first, but couldn’t capitalize on its vision.”
When reading the blog post I was reminded of the battle between Western Union and Alexander Graham Bell almost a century earlier. Here’s a short version of that story.
This week is the Microsoft (now annual?) Professional Developers Conference PDC 2009 in Los Angeles. We are expecting lots of news about current and future Microsoft products and news about the company’s cloud computing strategy.
Microsoft, side by side with Amazon, Google, SalesForce and maybe Yahoo! is a player in the cloud computing space and with products like Windows Azure, SQL Azure, Microsoft Online Services (BPOS), Exchange Online, certainly one of the heavyweights in everything cloud.
As always, this year’s PDC is first and foremost a conference for developers. And Steve Ballmer is right, a successful infrastructure, platform or service requires “developers, developers, developers”. So they will be getting quite an earful about the Microsoft cloud story. It will be a big coming out party.
But let us not forget we are not there yet. In today’s world of traditional computing, powered by servers in closets, server rooms or datacenters you need highly skilled and experienced IT Professionals keeping things performing, up to date and alive. But what will happen to admins, IT Pros and network and server guys once we use our apps in the cloud?
One of the goals for this blog is to provide IT Pros with the necessary insight and information about “cloud computing”:
- What is this thing “the cloud”?
- Who are the players in the cloud?
- How do their offerings differ?
- On-premise vs. off-premise
- Private cloud vs. public cloud
- XaaS (Everything-as-a-Service)
- What should an IT Pro expect 1, 3, 5 years after PDC2009?
Stay tuned for more information about PDC and beyond.
