Unexpected cloud computing costs cause sticker shock
August 13, 2013
Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Beth Pariseau.
The cloud offers easy resource provisioning and flexible pricing, but there are several cloud computing costs beyond the instance price lists to consider before deploying workloads there. Beyond the initial server instance, cloud computing pricing usually includes storage, networking, load balancing, security, redundancy, backup, application services and operating system licenses. Certain cloud computing costs — resource contention, storage, bandwidth and redundancy — can come as a surprise.
Server instance performance and provisioning costs
So-called noisy neighbors — server instances from other tenants in the cloud that share the same hardware and cause resource contention — are a common problem. "In a public-cloud world, you tend to have to have more capacity because of noisy neighbors consuming more resources than you’d expect on that shared host, the fact that certain hosts will become unresponsive, or the fact that you have to replace hosts frequently," said Jim O’Neill, CIO of the hosted marketing software provider HubSpot Inc., based in Cambridge, Mass. "We tend to see extra investment in additional capacity just to keep performance at a known state."…
While overprovisioning can sometimes be necessary, it’s also easy to go overboard in the opposite direction, according to Jared Reimer, co-founder of Cascadeo Corp., an IT consulting firm located in Mercer Island, Wash. "It’s very expensive if you are not continuously studying and right-sizing instances, storage pools, memory footprint, etc.," Reimer said. "We’ve seen companies, for example, take their VMware Converter, convert their virtual machine images into Amazon instances, boot them up and then get a huge bill and go, ‘What happened’? And the answer is that they made all of them large instances even when there was no legitimate reason to do so."…
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