Bringing comparison shopping to the cloud

Trying to compare and contrast the cost of computing resources between clouds takes a lot of fortitude. And, just when you think you’ve got the best possible price for a small compute instance or a couple gigs of storage, Amazon, or Google, or Microsoft or someone else cuts its prices. It’s like trying to tack jello to the wall, but CloudVertical is taking a stab at it with a new online competitive pricing site.

This is a ‘cheat sheet’ for cloud costs but we made it interactive,” said CloudVertical CEO Ed Byrne via email. The user selects the provider, region, currency and time period.

Some fun facts: Azure is cheaper than AWS for both Linux and Windows in Europe, but it’s more expensive for Linux in the US. And in the US, Windows is 44 percent cheaper on Azure than on AWS.

Some samples below.

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To be sure, not everyone thinks that hypothetical comparisons are possible.  James Mitchell, CEO of Strategic Blue Services, a Greenwich, UK-based cloud consultancy, said some services like 6Fusion, ComparetheCloud and CloudHarmony compare pricing on what cloud resources companies actually use. “Unless you measure what you actually use, it isn’t a fair comparison … you can’t do it just by scraping prices and instance sizes off websites,” Mitchell  said.

Mat Ellis, CEO of Cloudability, a Portland, Ore. company that tracks companies’ cloud usage is also skeptical. Via email, Ellis said:

“You can’t compare [different cloud services] because technically, they aren’t equivalent. For instance, Azure has slower I/O than the others. Folks like 6fusion are working to develop equivalent measures but even then this topic is controversial: how do you compare two instances where one has a ‘core’ that’s 18% faster, but the RAM is 6% slower, the network is *usually* 25% faster but can be up to 75% slower, and more variants of unix are supported…? It’s like comparing two cars of a similar model.”

Still, I would bet that prospective cloud customers might find a little whirl around the CloudVelocity site gives them a better idea of what they can expect if they opt to deploy services from these providers.


GigaOM