Most of the cloud service providers have a very superficial way of computing cost of services. Thus it is very hard to compare two architectures as well as two different forms of services in terms of cost. It would be a very big help if someone could provide me with some knowledge or an idea of the cost calculation procedures of various cloud providers.
i think cloud is based on the philosophy of "Any Thing As a Services"
For cost computation analysis, it is better to know your requirements from cost stand point. The services that are charged in public clouds are :
Machine - compute power ( computer in terms EC2 instances for Amazon) . It includes the number of hours you are going to need particular machine without shutting it down.
The amount of persistent storage
The data movements in and out of providers network.
The other cost factors could monitoring services.
These are typical cost factors for IAAS.
For PAAS,
We don't see direct cost of machines (compute resources). But the charges are based on number of accesses to databases, amount of storage, etc.
Comparing different cloud providers plan is not straight forward. For IAAS
The first steps would be find out allocation unit of the provider (like EC2 instance for Amazon , it includes FLOPS and RAM specs )
Then compute the cost for your requirement. You need to out in advance
1) For how much duration you want to use cloud (ex. 1 month or 1 year , 3 year , etc) 2) What would be daily usage pattern ( 1 hr , 2 hr , 12 hr , 24 hr ,etc)
3) Amount of persistent storage
4) Bandwidth requirement ( Data movement in & out of cloud provider network)
With these basic things you should compute the cost for each cloud provider you want asses. For different types of requirements, different providers may be cost effective as the providers would be trying target particular segment of users.
We followed a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) approach, including the costs for obtaining a cloud service. You might want to take a look at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=17088227&ini=aob and http://www.uwi.uni-osnabrueck.de/martens/2012%20Martens%20Walterbusch%20Teuteberg%20Costing%20of%20Cloud%20Computing%20Services%20A%20Total%20Cost%20of%20Ownership%20Approach.pdf
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