Show HN - Calculator that estimates your cloud costs | Hacker News Reader

Show HN - Calculator that estimates your cloud costs

kloudcalc.com

16 pointsBDangIT13 comments

Is it just me, or is could computing and the associated costs really difficult to figure out?

I'm not sure wether this is something I need to know, or is it specialist knowledge that server admins need to be on top of?

Maybe I'm dumb, but keeping up with all the software stuff coming out (frameworks, libraries, best practices etc) is hard enough. Personally, I'm struggling to figure out what's going on with hardware and could computing.

It's especially difficult when it comes to services like Heroku, where it seems I'm expected to know about hundreds of these "things" with on-trend logos and ambiguous names before I can feel like I've gotten anywhere near to making an informed decision.

Or maybe I should shut up moaning and read more... but where's the time man! WHERE'S THE GOD DAMN TIME! I"VE GOT OTHER THINGS TO DO!!!

I feel your pain. I just attended a NoSQL conference this week and my head is spinning with the amount of service providers and solutions there exists. One day, I'd like to extend my calculator to include doing a full blown IaaS vs PaaS comparo.

To answer your question, getting a good handle of knowing your operation costs has happened after the fact your servers were spinning. Most of my clients assumed that going to Cloud will help you save money. That has not been the case and I had to keep calculating costs over and over again.

Can you also add a daily (next to hourly) amount input? Because in our case (and I guess other companies/users) a big chunk of servers is running non-stop throughout the day and it is easier to get your mind around this figure.

For Amazon AWS, I find Amazon's tool to be much more detailed: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html

This was the source of my fustruation. I needed something quick and dirty to share with my clients. While I could create a spreadsheet to do it and there are a lot of them out there, I'd figure I just help others out there by creating a simple app.

For a quick grocery list of servers and costs, to show your team/boss/... in a meeting, this works just fine.

I can appreciate how much cleaner this is than the AWS calculator, although I agree, it lacks the detail.

It would be great to see Windows Azure costs on this calculator. Great job indeed! People usually also use Cloud Storage services (s3 etc), maybe you can do something for that.

Storage has been on my todo list. It's been a little difficult to grasph since AWS and Rackspace offer both block storage as well which charge differently than just straight GET/POST/PUT operations.

I'd like to be able to compare the same thing across providers.

e.g. what's the price difference between an AWS medium instance and the equivalent on Joyent/Rackspace?

Try http://www.cloudorado.com/ it does exactly that. You specify the requirements (RAM, CPU, etc) and it finds appropriate options from multiple providers.

Suggestion: it would be nice to see RDS instances in here too.

This is also on the roadmap as well. Since I'm seeing the trend for Database-as-a-Service.

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