If there is one thing that is certain in the cloud zone, it is ever changing prices. In fact, with price reduction being so frequent you need a Brainiac (a Superman villain) by your side to keep tabs on things.
For those of you who don’t have that ultra intelligent android at hand you can try out PlanForCloud — a free online tool to track these changes and calculate you the cost of you cloud adventure with six of the most popular providers.
The service incorporates 12,000 different pricing possibilities. All you need to do is plug in the resources you plan on using and then compare the results.
If only all things in life were this simple!
Worth mentioning is the fact that PlanForCloud actually launched back in February 2012, before being acquired by RightScale in June that year. It is now maintained as a regularly updated free service. As Kim Weins, the VP of marketing at RightScale put it:
“Compute, storage and network bandwidth are mature services that may have achieved all the gains that can be achieved by efficient deployment and management of these services.”
Meaning any further noticeable reductions in prices of these services may come more slowly and depend on the gains in the efficiency of the underlying hardware. This makes a price comparison service like this even more essential.
Users can pit and compare Windows Azure with five other popular cloud providers — including Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Google Compute Engine, SoftLayer and HP Cloud.
Intended resource deployment at these services can be fed into the comparison system, everything from the amount of bandwidth (in gigabytes) expected to be downloaded to the workload as well as an estimate of how the workload may grow in size over time.
Over the past 14 months, the service has reflected no less than 29 price reductions in cloud services. The generated information produces a project cost report that is based on a three-year life expectancy of the resource being used.
The Cloud War is just heating up, and with the big providers like Windows Azure and Amazon continually reducing their prices, this is one of the best ways (for users new and old) to stay in the loop and save money along the way by making the best decision according to needs and requirements.
Click here to visit the PlanForCloud website.
