How to use the AWS S3 Calculator

Posted on November 13, 2019 | by Ozzy Brightrose | Leave a Comment

How to use the AWS S3 Calculator

Before Amazon introduced the AWS S3 cost calculator, users basically had to enter their credit card details and cross their fingers that their monthly bill would be within their estimated range. Even though Amazon S3 was, generally, offering great value, this approach was still far from ideal so Amazon introduced the S3 cost calculator, which makes life a whole lot easier.

The AWS S3 calculator

Amazon offers a diverse (and very robust) set of management tools for Amazon Web Services, one of which is the Amazon Web Services Calculator. This is basically a mini-web-site with a page for each service, including Amazon S3.

The S3 cost calculator has two main tabs on it

At the current time, this may not be immediately obvious when you go to the S3 pricing page. The first tab you see is the “Services”, but there’s a tab to the right of it labeled “Estimate of your monthly bill”. Basically the idea is that you enter all the relevant data in the services tab and use the estimates page to see and export the result. You can go between these two tabs as you wish, taking multiple estimates if necessary.

Pay careful attention to the “Choose Region” field in the S3 cost calculator

The choose region field is right under the name of the tab, slightly apart from the majority of the data fields. Rather ironically, it is very easy to overlook even though it is quite possibly the most important field in the whole S3 cost calculator.

The basics of regions

At a very basic level, regions are just places where Amazon has data centers, plural, meaning at least two. Amazon calls these Availability Zones but essentially all this means in practice is that they are places where your data is stored both for access and for back-up.

These days, in many cases, your first priority will be to identify which zones you can legally use. For example, in regulated industry sectors, you may be mandated to keep data with a certain country or countries. Assuming you have a free choice, however, there are various factors could influence your choice and some of these may compete with each other.

In principle, the most sensible option is just to choose the region which is closest to your users, or, at least, the majority of your users, given that many businesses, even SMBs will be using decentralized working and/or may have decentralized customers. This reduces the distance data has to travel and hence should be the most secure option as well as the fastest.

In practice, while it may be the most secure option, it may not actually be the fastest because regions can have different latencies and different data-transfer speeds as demonstrated by the results of “ping” tests. This is, however, a complex issue as there are many factors which can influence test results, plus there’s always the possibility that Amazon will make changes in the future will which address the differences. For the time being, however, it’s an issue to keep in mind and see if it could be a consideration, if only a minor one. Possibly a more major one is that the number of Availability Zones varies between region, so if you need access to your cloud storage no matter what, then you may want to use a region which has a high number of Availability Zones (North Virginia is currently well ahead here).

What is (currently) a matter of fact is that there can be significant pricing differentials between regions. The reason for this is not clear, possibly it’s Amazon’s attempt to encourage people to use data centers where it has capacity. It’s also possible that S3 pricing will change in future, but for now, it can certainly be well worth exploring the possibility of using “less-obvious” regions, assuming you can legally do so.

Most of the rest of the Amazon S3 cost calculator is fairly self-explanatory

Even though the Amazon S3 cost calculator has a very lengthy list of fields, most of them are essentially self-explanatory, however, the key point to remember is that you still need to put some thought into answering the questions especially the ones related to data transfer in general and inter-regional data transfer in particular.

The reason why this can be a challenging issue is that these days there’s a good chance that at least some of the content stored will be video (because that is the way of the web these days) and this means that you will have to think not just about the length of the video but also the quality at which it is recorded.

What is Azure TCO Calculator

Posted on November 12, 2019 | by Ozzy Brightrose

In its early days, the Azure TCO calculator was reported as having some issues. In particular, there were claims that it massively overestimated VMware vSphere on-premises costs. At this point in time, however, the TCO calculator has moved out of “Preview” (or at least is no longer labeled as such) and it is now certified by Nucleus Research, which states that the Azure TCO calculator offers “calculations that generate a fair assessment of actual value a customer may achieve given the data entered.”

So, what exactly is the Azure TCO calculator for?

The Azure TCO calculator may not be perfect, but it appears to be reasonable.

As with most tools of this nature, this should not be taken as an exact statement of the total cost of ownership of your Azure services, but current feedback is that it does give a reasonable estimation of what you can expect to pay to use Microsoft Azure.

The Azure TCO calculator starts with an assessment of your current situation.

You start by inputting details of your current servers, databases, storage and networking. While that sentence is brief, it’s worth noting that the time needed to input this information accurately may be very lengthy.

For example, under servers, you (currently) have to give details of workload, environment, operating system, server number, processes per server, cores per process, RAM (GB), necessary optimization, GPU and whether or not they are Windows Server 2008/2008R2.

For databases, it’s (currently): source database type, license type, environment, operating system, servers, processes per server, cores per process, RAM (GB), optimization type and whether or not they are SQL Server 2008/2008R2 plus destination service, maximum DB size and maximum concurrent logins.

The good news is that the options for storage and network are much more limited. The bad news is that you may need to repeat this process multiple times to accommodate different options in your local setup.

The even worse news is that, for some strange reason, the Azure TCO calculator lacks the ability to save a session and come back to it later. On the plus side, there’s no sign of sessions timing out either, so you can just leave the browser window open, just make sure to keep it open or you may find yourself crying into your coffee at having to input all the data again.

In fairness to Microsoft Azure, their approach does force you to gather the data that, one way or another, you’re probably going to need. It would just be nice if they would add the option to save a session.

The Azure TCO calculator then provides assumptions you probably need to review

One of the interesting quirks of the Azure TCO calculator is that the page of assumptions starts with every option in full detail and then goes on to give a list of headings that you need to expand to review properly. According to Microsoft, these headings “typically require less adjustment by customers”. That’s fine, but there’s a difference between “less” and “none” so you do need to click on each heading and make any changes you feel necessary.

The Azure TCO calculator provides very “management-friendly” reports.

You have to hand it to Microsoft, they understand the business-to-business environment and they specifically understand that decisions about IT management and operations are often taken by (or at least with input from) people who really know little to nothing about IT but do understand finance and do appreciate pretty graphs, charts and other visuals summarizing key information in an easy-to-understand format.

Microsoft certainly delivers here, but to be fair, the report it creates is much more than just a bunch of pretty pictures. It does offer the option to dive down into the finest detail, so you can see exactly how it has valued your current infrastructure costs and compare them with what it expects you to use in Azure services.

The reports can be downloaded, shared and exported. Alternatively, you can go back to adjust your assumptions or even back again to adjust your initial data if, for some reason, you suddenly discover that you made a mistake when you entered it. In fact, you may even wish to do both so you have the chance to play about with the various assumptions.

Assumptions are at the heart of the Azure TCO calculator.

The “workloads” page is really just a statement of fact. The assumptions page, in spite of the name, is essentially a page of recommendations from Microsoft Azure and, quite bluntly, from Microsoft’s perspective, they’re a balancing act between demonstrating how much you could save by using Azure services and maximizing the profit they make by upselling Azure services.

This is why you should probably take the results of the Azure TCO calculator, not exactly with a pinch of salt, but more as a starting point of experimentation and negotiation or as a basis from which to try out different options, which you can then export for easy comparison and, if necessary, further discussion with relevant managers.

What is Azure Blob Pricing Calculator

Posted on November 11, 2019 | by Ozzy Brightrose | Leave a Comment

Azure Blob Pricing Calculator

Blob is the Azure equivalent of Amazon S3. While the storage services have a lot of similarities, each has its own pricing structure. With that in mind, here is a brief guide to understanding the Azure Blob pricing calculator.

The Azure Blob pricing calculator is available from the Azure website

This may sound like stating the obvious, but the Azure Blob pricing calculator is available from the Azure website, rather than the main Microsoft website. The most straightforward way to get to it is to click on the “Pricing” heading and then click on the button which says “Pricing Calculator”. Alternatively you can use the search function to go directly to the pricing calculator. You don’t have to be signed in to your account to use the pricing calculator itself, although you will have to be signed in if you want to save your estimates to your account, so it might be helpful just to do this upfront.

Azure Blob pricing comes under “Storage Accounts”

One of the quirks of the Azure Blob pricing calculator is that you don’t just click on a heading and get taken through to the relevant pricing calculator. Instead you get a message advising you that the relevant item has been added and you have to click to view it. This means that if you accidentally click more than once, the item will be added more than once. This isn’t a problem, just click the delete button to the right of the main calculator.

The accuracy of the Azure Blob pricing calculator depends entirely on the data you enter

This point is true of cloud resources in general and it applies particularly to storage services (albeit not just Azure Blob). The whole, basic principle behind cloud resources is that you pay for what you need, no less and no more. The obvious implication of this is that you need to think about what cloud resources you need (and, by extension, what cloud resources you do not need). Another, possibly less obvious, implication of this is that it is very much in your best interests to finesse the cloud resources you do need so that you achieve the best, possible value for money.

When it comes to the Azure Blob pricing calculator, the key point to note is that many of the default options can be “downgraded” and that nudging these down, even slightly, can lead to cost savings which will multiply over the longer term. This is the very essence of cloud cost optimization.

Having said that, remember to avoid the trap of false economy. If you are running business-critical apps in the cloud then the chances are you’ll want them to be able to access storage in the fastest, possible time and any cost savings you make by opting for more affordable storage, will probably end up being more than outweighed by wasted staff hours and frustrated end customers. Basically, be prepared to pay for what you really need, just look for opportunities to dial it back, if only slightly, whenever it is possible to do so.

Azure Blob pricing has limited sub-options

It can be challenging to price some of the cloud resources you find in Microsoft Azure because answering one question then spawns numerous others. This is particularly noticeable when adding Windows or Linux virtual machines. With Azure Blob, the options tend to be not just self-explanatory but self-contained. In other words, you just answer a question and move on rather than having to specify numerous details about it. Just make sure what you do enter is accurate, otherwise the estimate will be essentially useless.

There are different ways to purchase Azure Blob

One of the ways in which Azure differs greatly from Amazon Web Services is that it is backed by a company which has spent its entire existence largely in the business-to-business sector and hence has developed an extensive and sophisticated infrastructure for delivering its various services.

What that means for Azure Blob is that you can either choose to buy your cloud resources directly from Microsoft or buy them from a Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP). Basically this is a managed services provider, which happens to specialize in Microsoft Azure.

In the former case, billing and support both come from Microsoft and the onus is on you to manage your cloud resources yourself. In the latter case, your billing and support will come from your CSP and they will, at a minimum, give substantial assistance with the provisioning, deployment and usage management of your Azure cloud resources. They may even take complete ownership of running your system for you, depending on the nature of your agreement.

Buying directly from Microsoft will almost certainly get you a more affordable “headline” price, however, if you’re looking to go down the managed-services route anyway, then you may get better value overall by going through a CSP.

azure lift and shift

The building blocks of an effective hybrid cloud strategy

Posted on November 8, 2019 | by Ozzy Brightrose | Leave a Comment

Developing an effective hybrid cloud strategy allows SMBs to have the best of both worlds. They can keep their most sensitive data and applications in their own private clouds and use public cloud services for everything else. This balances the optimum security of private clouds with the cost effectiveness of public clouds. These benefits do, however, come at a price, which is that hybrid cloud infrastructure takes a lot of advance planning to implement effectively.

Hybrid cloud strategy is more complex to build and manage than either private or public clouds.

As the old saying goes, “complexity is the enemy of execution”. In other words, the more difficult it is to do something, the more likely it is that you’ll make a mistake. A hybrid cloud model is more complex to implement than either a private cloud or a public cloud on its own. That shouldn’t put you off implementing one. There is a very good reason why hybrid cloud environments are hugely popular. It should, however, act as a red flag that you need to make sure you think everything through carefully before you take action.

With that in mind, here is a guide to the building blocks of an effective hybrid cloud strategy

Everything starts with a clear overview of your existing computing resources.

This is true of any cloud migration, however it holds particular relevance for hybrid cloud infrastructures as it is often much more difficult to make changes later, hence it is even more important to do everything you can to get it right first time.

You also need a clear overview of your existing work processes

It is absolutely impossible to overstate the importance of this step. You need to know far more than who does what, where and when. You need to know how and why. The core of any effective hybrid cloud strategy is getting everything in the right place (or places) and keeping it there as much as possible. As a rule of thumb, it is usually most cost effective to put data and applications in the public cloud unless there is a very compelling reason to put them within the private cloud. The reason for this is that public cloud services are usually massively more scalable than private clouds.

Keep cost effectiveness front and center in your planning

One of the quirks of hybrid cloud (multicloud) infrastructure is that cost effectiveness has totally different implications in the private and public clouds.

In the private cloud, cost effectiveness is all about effective capacity planning and making sure you are covered for spikes in demand. This often means investing in hardware which will lie idle for most of the time purely and simply so that it is there when you need it. Cost effectiveness, therefore, generally means aiming to make purchases at the most attractive price, so negotiating with suppliers, looking for bulk discounts and so forth.

In the public cloud, cost effectiveness basically means cost optimization. In other words you aim to buy exactly what you need, no less and no more, at the best, possible price. Established skills like capacity planning do very much still come into play, just in a different manner. In short, you use your best estimates of traffic volumes to take advantage of the discounts available to those who pay in advance (for example, reserved instances in Amazon Web Services), knowing that, if necessary, you can top this up with on-demand usage.

You need to do everything possible to minimize traffic between the private and public clouds

First of all, for the most part, data should never travel from the private cloud to the public cloud. If it’s in the private cloud, it’s presumably there for security reasons and therefore sending it to the public cloud would defeat the purpose of putting it in the private cloud in the first place. There may be some exceptions to this, such as when data is cleansed and stored, but for the most part, if you’re putting data in the private cloud then it’s there for a reason and it should probably stay there.

Secondly, although all the public cloud services have their own prices and terms, it’s probably safe to assume that any traffic from the public cloud to the private cloud will incur charges from the public cloud vendor. This being so, the principle of cost effectiveness dictates that you should minimize it.

It’s also worth noting that some traffic within the public cloud may incur charges. For example in Amazon Web Services, intrazonal traffic is free but interzonal traffic is charged. You therefore not only want to minimize traffic between the private and public clouds but also traffic within the public-cloud zones.

This is all perfectly possible, it just requires an in-depth understanding of your existing infrastructure and your existing work processes, hence the fact that they were the first two points in this guide.

Cloud Cost Management: Strategies for Cloud Costs Reduction

Posted on November 7, 2019 | by Ozzy Brightrose | Leave a Comment

Cloud cost management symbolizes managing and using cloud services in a cost-efficient manner to maximize the business. In particular, the term refers to organizing expenses by monitoring cloud resource usage and business needs.

These days, cloud computing has become an ever-evolving trend. Most of the businesses and IT departments now follow this cost-conscious approach to innovate business better.

Moving business to the cloud offers dramatic improvements, and increased profits. It is possibly the preeminent technique to lower spending and boost revenue.

There is no need to prepare an extra budget for data storage, security, support, and all other resources.

Why Go for Cloud Cost Management?

Cloud cost management is all about analyzing overall cloud costs and strategizing to spend the amount smartly. From identifying the resource consumption to infrastructure planning, the cloud cost management strategy covers everything.

Cloud technology is truly an innovative and practical approach to improve business performance and efficiency.

A business can easily integrate the required resources and calculate overall costs related to cloud technology.

There come exclusive cloud cost models and subscription plans to make a natural choice.

These cost structure models cover everything from scalability and security to all-time support and boost-up performance.

Cloud cost management produces an excellent impact on the overall businesses. The business data directly operates with cloud and poor cost management can also impact negatively. Even the poor cost models can create numerous issues for the business.

So, it is better to choose the resources and services as per business requirements. By doing so, the business grows efficiently without paying additional bills for unused resources.

Reducing Cloud Spending with Cloud Cost Management: The Tips

Various options, such as cloud models, subscription plans, and more, assist in trimming down the cloud costs by a considerable margin.

When operating the business on Cloud, spending is reduced to one-third or less. That’s why most companies these days migrate to cloud technology.

Simply put, moving the business to cloud is the ultimate decision to trim down infrastructure, hardware, network, security, storage, and many other costs.

And, when operating with the cloud, you pay only for the used resources and not for the ordered ones.

Scalability and flexibility are the two primary reasons most businesses are migrating to cloud.

But, those business owners know how fast costs grow when it comes to expanding services with innovative resources. And, it becomes tricky to manage the expenses.

Well, that’s when cloud management comes to the rescue.

Let’s put together the tips to reduce cloud costs & get the most of cloud cost management.

Right-Sizing Server Instances

Choosing server instances that perfectly suit your business workload needs would not harm the budget.

Right-sizing is a part of cloud cost optimization, and network instances come first when it is about reducing the cloud costs.

Having too many servers for the business, which are unused, results in adding unnecessary charges to the monthly bills.

There are cloud providers named Google Cloud, Amazon Web Service (AWS), and AZURE, which offer server-optimized options available at competitive prices.

Modifying server instances to an adequate size, which are actually required for workloads, would work the best to reduce regular bills.

Removing In-active Resources

When it comes to cloud cost optimization, in-active or unused resources turn out to be the chief facet.

And, this remains the most unnoticed part while executing cloud management task. It’s better to remove the unused resources after the process is done.

These purchased and no-longer-used resources increase the monthly bill and nothing else.

So, finding and getting rid of such resources would be a smart decision to reduce cloud costs.

Choosing Discounted-Reserved Instances

Who doesn’t love discounts? And guess what? Even these cloud services are available at discounted prices, under specific conditions.

The virtual servers or cloud instances are available at competitive prices too. The Amazon Web Service (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft AZURE are some of the top cloud providers offering such discounts.

The Amazon Reserved Instances, Amazon EC2, is probably the best to reduce IT costs.

And, yes, choosing a specific cost and time-efficient instance type would work the best.

Prefer Storage Tiers

Storage plays the most crucial part in overall cloud costs. Starting from hardware spends to increasing cloud storage when required, these spends can generate a surprising bill for you.

It’s better to choose storage tiers, or as per the business requirement, to reduce extra spends.

There are storage tiers to store and backup data in the cloud. So, if you do not wish to use the cloud data, then it’s better to save it in a cheap-storage tier.

The charges are basically calculated by the Retrieval Time and Requests. In particular, this means the costs are calculated by the data-access rate, storage capacity, and bandwidth.

A Take Home Message

All in all, reducing cloud costs with cloud cost management strategies can be achieved precisely.

Following cloud cost optimization techniques would probably work the best to save some bucks. With comprehensive cloud management strategies, businesses innovate better and quicker.

A laser focused precision when optimizing your cloud cost demands an advanced calculation. Go ahead and calculate your cloud cost with these calculators designed by our cloud economists:

AWS Lambda Cost Calculator

S3 Cost Calculator

EC2 Cost Calculator

AWS Data Transfer Calculator

aws lift and shift migration

Five Basic Principles of Cloud Cost Monitoring and Management

Posted on November 6, 2019 | by Ozzy Brightrose | Leave a Comment

There are all kinds of reasons why companies undertake cloud migrations, but it’s probably fair to say that many of them are likely to revolve around the potential to reduce costs. Cloud environments can indeed offer the potential for significant cost savings but in practice they are only going to do so if you manage them properly. In other words, if you’re prepared to get to grips with cloud cost monitoring and optimization.

Cloud Cost Monitoring and Management

Tools can be helpful, but only if you actually understand how to use them effectively

Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure all have tools you can use to monitor and optimize your cloud spend. There is also a wide variety of third-party tools for the same purpose. These range from offerings which are intended to be “one tool to rule them all” to tools which are intended for one, very specific, aspect of cloud cost monitoring and optimization, such as the performance of your applications, the health of your database or the standard of your network data-flow.

If you’re a small SMB, using just one public cloud vendor, these are very likely to be more than you need. If, however, you’re a larger SMB, they could be very helpful even if you’re just using one public cloud vendor and especially if you’re using multiple public cloud vendors. Tools, however, are generally only as capable as the person using them, so if you want to make any cloud cost monitoring and optimization tool work for you, you’ll need to understand the five basic principles of cloud cost monitoring and optimization.

1. Your cloud strategy needs to manage your cloud infrastructure actively

When you do your initial cloud migration, you’ll have a clear map of your entire cloud infrastructure. You might even have taken your cloud migration as an opportunity to clean up your systems and make them more streamlined and efficient.

The problem, however, is that the cloud environment makes it just so easy to add a virtual machine here and some storage there and create a dependency somewhere else. To be fair, it also makes it easy to remove them, but humans don’t necessarily remember to tidy up everything after their work is done, especially not when they want to go home for the day (or weekend).

This means that your cloud strategy needs to include a process whereby you actively and regularly check your cloud infrastructure so you know what you actually have (or had and terminated) rather than what you think you have (or had and terminated).

2. You need to understand what you do to resource it effectively

Similarly, you need to understand what the people in your organization are doing so you can provide them with exactly the level of resource they need, no less and certainly no more. Remember that one of the major benefits of cloud computing is that it gives you the opportunity to finesse resources to an impressive level of detail.

Probably the most obvious example of this is the way you can adjust the speed of your storage to suit the application. It’s obvious that you’d use your fastest storage for the most business-critical applications and your slowest storage for tasks like data warehousing, but look out for opportunities to rein in the speed of all the tasks in between. Just turning down the storage speed a little bit may be a very minor inconvenience to users (in fact they may not even notice it), but it could save your organization a lot of money.

3. Monitoring cloud cost monitoring and optimization needs to be a team effort

As a bare minimum, there needs to be two people with the skills and knowledge to undertake cloud cost monitoring and optimization in an effective manner. That way, if one is off, for any reason, or leave the company, the other one can cover. Two, however, is cutting it fine and will probably only be feasible in the smallest of SMBs. Ideally you want a team of people sharing the work in an agreed manner (so as to avoid duplication/replication of responsibilities) and each team member should have their own cover.

4. Access control matters, a lot

Basically, you want to do everything you reasonably can to limit the number of people who can buy reserved instances and you absolutely must do everything you possibly can to limit the number of people who can authorize on-demand usage. In simple terms, you want to create a situation where every cost is owned by someone who is held accountable for it. Ideally, you want this accountability to be incorporated into their job description and performance objectives.

5. Use automation as much as possible

Automation is your safeguard against human forgetfulness. If you really don’t want to take the risk of automated tools closing down resources without human oversight, then have them send alerts and make sure humans act on them.

cloud cost reduction

Author: Ozzy Brightrose