How do you compare the cost of two cloud or IaaS offerings? Is Amazon EC2’s small instance (1 ECU, 1.7GB RAM, 160GB storage) cheaper or is Rackspace cloud’s 256MB server (4 cores, 256MB RAM, 10GB storage) cheaper? Unfortunately, answering this question is very difficult. One reason is that cloud vendors have been offering virtual machines with different configurations, i.e., different combinations of CPU power, memory and storage, making is difficult to perform an apple-to-apple comparison.
Towards the goal of a better apple-to-apple comparison, I will break down the cost for CPU, memory and storage individually for Amazon EC2 in this post. For those not interested in understanding the methodology, the high level conclusions are as follows. In Amazon’s N. Virginia data center, the unit costs are:
- 1 ECU costs $0.01369/hour
- 1 GB of RAM costs $0.0201/hour
- 1 GB of local storage costs $0.000159/hour
- A 10GB network interface costs $0.41/hour
- A…
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