Billing Management in GCP-AWS-Azure

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Comparing the billing in the cloud is complex. It’s difficult to make apple-to-apple comparisons because cloud providers offer a different pricing model, frequent price cuts and unique discounting options.

With the rise of the three major cloud providers—Google, Microsoft, Amazon — all offer discounts (reaching as high as 75 percent) in exchange for committing to usage on respective cloud platforms for one year or five years period. In all cases, the user can decide how much usage to commit, and how much to leave as on-demand.

AWS PricingThe discount and the billing in AWS depends on RIs(Reserved Instances)
RIs are not actual instances, but they are like discount Coupons that can be applied to instances that meet certain criteria. It depends on the user which plan he opts for, it can be a one-year or three-year plan, when committed for a long time gets a higher discount. If the user pays all the committed usage before, the discounts increase accordingly.

There is another convertible plan for 3 years RI, which though gives the user less discount but it has a flexible plan which can be moved between different instance families during the whole 3-year term of the RI. The discount varies from 24 to 75 percent depending upon the users RI term, the region, and the instance.

While purchasing 3 years RIs there is a catch as the usage may change sporadically over the 3 years span. Whereas convertible RIs allow the user to adapt to new instance type, below there is a chart which refers to a convertible RIs offer of 5-6 percentage extra discount when compared to 1-year standard RIs, while locking it for 3 years in place of 1.

About AWS Reserve Instances (RI)

Azure Pricing

The initial approach for getting discount on Azure is the Microsoft Agreement (EA).

EAs offer a range of discount depending from 15-45 percentage on the level of usage the user has committed to.

It has a combination of analytical products called Cortana Intelligence including HDInsight with Hadoop, Spark, Storm or HBase. It has a very simple pricing model which depends on the type and number of nodes running. These nodes govern, a number of cores, ram and disk space available on each node.

In Azure, there is a prepayment option available wherein Microsoft offers 2.5-5 % based on payment done for 6 months or 12 months. Here, we can check the spending limit. When it is on credit, the usage can be managed and if the usage is limited, then as soon as the services are used, it gets disabled and there is no extra charge.

In this, we add tags to resources to group the billing data for supported services. Features like price calculator and cost analysis play a major role in getting the exact billing.

​Google Cloud Pricing

Google Cloud Platform provides Sustained Usage Discount (SUD) which is the simplest approach to saving money on compute resources and gives the user discount on the monthly plan based on the percentage of the usage in a monthly bill. It happens automatically and doesn’t require any upfront commitment.

Suppose, an instance which has been running for 25 percentage of the month, the prices directly goes down to 80 percentage of on demand (20 percent discount), and when a user uses 50 percent and 75 percent of the plan committed for a month, the discount goes another 20 percent due to which, instance running 100 percent of the time in the entire month will get a maximum of 30 percent discount.

Note: Google Cloud combines different instances of the same type when possible and gives the most appropriate discount.

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