How much different are Cloud ROI calculators and the actual pricing mechanism?

Competition between Cloud service providers have been gathering much heat now a days. Earlier, Amazon Web Services was ruling the roost and others were just setting up or warming up themselves to enter the battlefield of Cloud Computing. This business involves heavy capital expenses. So, very few cash rich companies were showing interest. But, now after sensing the future trend and demand, most of the companies into Information technology are making it a cloud first strategy and recorrected their business plan and vision. Every Cloud Service Providers are introducing new features and clubbing that into existing service packages for better revenue generation. The actual service or pricing package has become complicated for a user to understand and make the optimal use of the pricing strategy. Many Cloud providers have devised Cloud cost calculator by keeping these factors into consideration for pricing. But, none of them could match the exact pricing standards or the actual pricing for usage. The factors most of the calculators do not assume are the product features that the user might need at the time of scaling up or launching a new application.

Most of the time the user is also not aware about the different product features and its best case use scenario. Calculator also do not use any real time data to speculate instant bandwidth use or any storage need. Amazon Web Services has its own Cloud ROI Calculator as Simple Monthly Calculator. This AWS Pricing Calculator uses factors like computing EC2 instances usage, Amazon EBS Volume's storage and IOPS usage with description. The form has to be filled up manually. Number if additional elastic IP's used, Elastic IP non attached time, Number of Elastic IP Remaps, inter-region data transfer out, total data transfer out, total data transfer in, VPC peering data transfer, intra region data transfer, public IP/Elastic IP data transfer, number of Elastic Load Balancing, total data processed by all ELBs, hosted zones followed by all the product features. All these factors cannot be filled up by users if they are using on premise data centers and never experienced Cloud. Microsoft Azure follows simple principles with the pricing calculator selected factors like free, basic, standard and premium pricing format. The form has to be filled with buttons ( automated ).

They also cover the factors like server types, active directory, traffic manager, service bus, notification hubs, media services, VPN services, search Express Route. Microsoft Azure's ROI calculator is more user friendly than AWS Price Calculator. Google Compute Engine Cloud Calculator also helps to make calculation into consideration the same factors followed by Amazon and Microsoft, but, in a very coherent way. Rackspace Cloud calculator follows the Microsoft Azure's path in auto selecting factors for Cloud usage calculations. We can conclude by saying that calculators has to be more defined and automated as like the Microsoft and Rackspace way and price estimation has to be more accurate as with the actual consumption.

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