Cloud pricing report 2021

Key findings
• The reference cloud pricing from leading public cloud providers is
very similar.
• The reference cloud pricing from leading private cloud providers is
very divergent.
• Public clouds continue to be the most cost-efficient platform for
small-scale deployments.
• Private clouds continue to be the most cost-efficient platform for
medium-scale and large-scale deployments.
• A multi-cloud architecture emerges to be the most economical cloud
architecture, ensuring maximum CapEx and OpEx efficiency.

Introduction
Estimating and comparing cloud pricing between public and private clouds has
always been challenging. While leading public cloud providers maintain the
official pricing for their cloud services in a form of cost-per-resource metrics,
resembling the same in the private cloud space is not trivial. As a result, the
most effective way to compare costs between public and private clouds is to
estimate the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the workloads and use it as a
subject of the comparison.

In the following report, we present the reference cloud pricing from leading
public and private cloud providers as of June 2021. We compare sample cost-per-
resource metrics for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure and Google Cloud
Platform (GCP) instances based on the same criteria. In turn, on the private cloud
front, we compare license and delivery costs, and support service fees for
VMware, Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Canonical’s Charmed OpenStack. We
also demonstrate how using TCO calculators enables organisations to make the
right decision regarding their cloud architecture based on economic criteria.
 Reference cloud pricing
The reference cloud pricing is what organisations usually check in the first place
when trying to estimate the TCO of their workloads. Since all presented
platforms provide the same level of enterprise support, in most cases the
decision of which cloud infrastructure to choose is driven by economics. While
public clouds prove to be more economical for small-scale deployments, private
clouds are more cost-efficient at a larger scale. Therefore, using a multi-cloud
architecture, consisting of the public cloud infrastructure and cost-effective
private cloud is usually the most optimal solution.

Public cloud platforms

In order to compare the reference pricing of leading public cloud providers, one
has to be opinionated about what exactly to compare. This is because there are
hundreds of different instance types available in their portfolio and tens of
different metrics that are metered and billed according to usage. Since compute
resources usually represent the biggest portion of the TCO, only cost-per-
instance metrics are analysed in the following report.

In order to compare cost-per-instance metrics across AWS, Azure and GCP the
following criteria have been applied:

• Pricing model: on-demand instances

• Region preference: US East (Northern Virginia)
• Operating system: Ubuntu
• CPU family preference: AMD EPYC 7000

The cost-per-instance metrics were collected for general-purpose, compute-

optimised and memory-optimised instance types, each with 4 virtual central
processing units (vCPUs).

The reference pricing from leading public cloud providers is shown in Tab. 1.

Instance type AWS instance / price Azure instance / price GCP instance / price

n2d-standard-4 /
General-purpose m5a.xlarge / $0.172000 D4a v4 / $0.192000
$0.190320

n2d-highcpu-4 /
Compute-optimised c5a.xlarge / $0.154000 F4s v2 / $0.169000
$0.140508

n2d-highmem-4 /
Memory-optimised r5a.xlarge / $0.226000 E4a v4 / $0.252000
$0.256736

Tab. 1 Reference pricing for public cloud platforms.

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 Based on the presented data it can be seen that AWS provides the lowest
reference pricing for general-purpose and memory-optimised instances.
Although GCP provides the lowest reference pricing for compute-optimised
instances, it is important to mention that such instances on GCP use 1 GB of
random-access memory (RAM) per 1 vCPU, while the same instance types on AWS
and Azure use 2 GB of RAM per 1 vCPU. This allows Google to offer compute-
optimised instances at a better price. Besides this, there are no significant
differences in the reference pricing from leading public cloud providers.

Private cloud platforms

Comparing the reference cloud pricing across leading private cloud vendors is
much more straightforward. When it comes to private cloud implementation,
the vendor’s service fee usually consists of the license costs, design and delivery
costs and the ongoing support subscription costs. In addition, some vendors
offer fully managed services for their private cloud platform, fully offloading
organisations’ internal operations teams.

The reference pricing from leading private cloud providers is shown in Tab. 2.

Red Hat OpenStack Canonical’s Charmed

Service fee VMware vRealize
Platform* OpenStack

$7,945 per 1 CPU

License $0 $0
or 25 VMs

~$10,000 per week $75,000 or $150,000

Design and delivery $587,000 per cloud
of engagement per engagement

$1,986 per 1 CPU

Support only ~$6,300 per 2 CPUs $1,500 per host
or 25 VMs

Support and
Not available Not available $5,475 per host
fully-managed

Tab. 2 Reference pricing for private cloud platforms.

* - Red Hat OpenStack Platform reference pricing is not publicly available. The
provided prices are indicative and are based on third-party reports and sources.

Based on the presented data it can be seen that the reference pricing and the
pricing model differs significantly across leading private cloud providers. First of
all, VMware is the only vendor that requires licenses to be purchased for their
vRealize platform. In turn, while both VMware and Canonical offer consulting
services at a fixed price, Red Hat charges based on the duration of the
engagement - which is generally between several weeks and months. When it
comes to the support subscription VMware and Red Hat make them dependent
on the number of CPUs or VMs, while Canonical simply charges per the number
of hosts. Canonical is also the only vendor that offers fully-managed services for
their Charmed OpenStack platform.

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 TCO calculators
Although the reference cloud pricing helps to roughly estimate costs, in reality, a
lot of other factors have an impact on the total cost of ownership (TCO). This is
because additional charges are applied based on the storage and network
consumption, significant discounts are available when running workloads long-
term, or in the case of private clouds, one should include hardware costs, hosting
charges and operations and maintenance costs in their estimates. Therefore,
when estimating the TCO it is best to use TCO calculators. The following section
provides a brief overview of the most popular ones.

AWS TCO calculator

AWS TCO calculator available at https://calculator.aws/ enables TCO estimates of
cloud instances based on their number, configuration and additional
requirements regarding storage and network. Various regions, guest operating
systems and pricing models are available to enable more detailed estimates.
The calculator estimates total monthly and yearly costs.

Azure TCO calculator

Azure TCO calculator available at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/
calculator/ provides similar capabilities to the AWS TCO calculator. It enables
estimating the TCO of cloud instances based on their number, configuration and
additional requirements. One thing it is missing compared to the AWS TCO
calculator is an advanced estimate option that enables specifying the workload
and choosing more granular reservation options.

GCP TCO calculator

GCP TCO calculator available at https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator is
very similar to the Azure TCO calculator in terms of its capabilities. Again, it
enables estimating the TCO of cloud instances based on their number,
configuration and requirements for storage and networking. Similarly to the
Azure TCO calculator, it is missing some more advanced features compared to
the AWS TCO calculator.

VMware TCO calculator

VMware TCO calculator available at https://tco.vmware.com/ enables estimating
annual OpEx costs of VMware clusters based on the number of instances, their
configuration and storage requirements. The calculator provides an option to
specify hosting charges, including rent and electricity costs. It does not calculate
CapEx costs though.

Charmed OpenStack TCO calculator

Charmed OpenStack TCO calculator available at https://ubuntu.com/openstack/
tco-calculator enables estimating the TCO of Charmed OpenStack private cloud
based on the number of instances, their configuration and required support
level. More accurate estimates are available on-demand based on detailed
requirements. All estimates contain typical CapEx and OpEx costs, including
hardware costs, hosting charges and operations and maintenance costs.

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 Sample cost scenarios
In the following section, we demonstrate sample scenarios and provide guidance
on the cloud architecture choices. All estimates were obtained using TCO
calculators presented in the “TCO calculators” section, augmented with the
reference pricing presented in the “Reference cloud pricing” section wherever
needed. All public cloud estimates assume a reserved instances pricing model
with a 3-year timeframe and Ubuntu guest OS. All private cloud estimates
assume a 3-year hardware renewal period and include reference hardware costs,
typical hosting charges and operations and maintenance costs. It has been
assumed that the average annual operations team staff salary is $125,000 and
the operations team size is 12 for 24/7 maintenance with 99.99% uptime.

Scenario 1: Small-scale - Internal CRM system

In this scenario a software company is hosting a third-party customer
relationship management (CRM) system for their internal purposes. The
platform consists of a database and web application. The roughly estimated
requirements for this system are shown in Tab. 3.

Amount of
Number of Amount of Network Additional
Purpose persistent
vCPUs RAM [TB] requirements information
storage [TB]

Database 24 0.2 2 No No

Web application 24 0.1 0 No No

Tab. 3. Small-scale sample requirements.

The estimated TCO for this system across leading public and private cloud
providers is shown in Tab. 4 and Fig. 1.

CapEx OpEx annual TCO

Cloud platform
[USD] [USD] [USD]

AWS 0 12,819.36 38,458.08

Azure 0 11,869.80 35,609.40

GCP 0 11,102.16 33,306.48

VMware vRealize 930,335 1,534,458 5,533,709

Red Hat OpenStack

399,500 1,547,400 5,041,700
Platform

Charmed OpenStack
637,500 143,700 1,068,600
(fully-managed)

Tab. 4. Small-scale TCO estimates.

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 Fig. 1. Small-scale TCO estimates.

In this case, there is no economic justification for private cloud implementation.

The organisation should host all workloads in the public cloud, but continue
monitoring resource consumption and be able to move to a private cloud once
the number of workloads grows.

Scenario 2: Medium-scale - Online banking system

In this scenario, a financial institution is hosting its own online banking system in
the cloud. The system consists of a database, web application and a number of
developer VMs. The roughly estimated requirements for this system are shown
in Tab. 5.

Amount of
Number of Amount of Network Additional
Purpose persistent
vCPUs RAM [TB] requirements information
storage [TB]

Moderate
Database 500 4 40 No
inter-AZ traffic

Moderate Daily 16-hour

Web application 1,000 4 0
inbound traffic load spike

Used during
Developer VM 200 0.8 5 No business
hours only

ARM CPUs
required; Used
Developer VM 20 0.08 0.5 No
during business
hours only

Tab. 5. Medium-scale sample requirements.

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 The estimated TCO for this system across leading public and private cloud
providers is shown in Tab. 6 and Fig. 2.

CapEx OpEx annual TCO

Cloud platform
[USD] [USD] [USD]

AWS 0 472,247.46 1,416,742.38

Azure 0 391,502.04 1,174,506.12

GCP 0 361,619.04 1,084,857.12

VMware vRealize 1,108,115 1,564,402 5,801,321

Red Hat OpenStack

545,500 1,594,600 5,329,300
Platform

Charmed OpenStack
637,500 143,700 1,068,600
(fully-managed)

Tab. 6. Medium-scale TCO estimates.

Fig. 2. Medium-scale TCO estimates.

In this case, it makes more sense to deploy cost-effective private cloud

infrastructure and host the majority of the workloads there. As the
implementation of additional ARM-based hypervisors for the purpose of hosting a
small number of developer VMs is not economically feasible, the organisation can
use a hybrid/multi-cloud architecture to host those instances in the public cloud.

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 Scenario 3: Large-scale - Video streaming system
In this scenario, an entertainment company is hosting their own video streaming
system. The system consists of a data warehouse, data lake, data analytics, video
transcoding engine and web application. The roughly estimated requirements
for this system are shown in Tab. 7.

Amount of
Number of Amount of Network Additional
Purpose persistent
vCPUs RAM [TB] requirements information
storage [TB]

Moderate
Data warehouse 32,000 256 5,120 No
inter-AZ traffic

Data lake 4,000 32 256 No No

Run daily
Data analytics 12,000 24 0 No
for 8 hours

Video
Daily 8-hour
transcoding 24,000 48 0 No
load spike
engine

High outbound Daily 8-hour

Web application 6,000 24 0
traffic load spike

Tab. 7. Large-scale sample requirements.

The estimated TCO for this system across leading public and private cloud
providers is shown in Tab. 8 and Fig. 3.

CapEx OpEx annual TCO

Cloud platform
[USD] [USD] [USD]

AWS 0 26,020,604.88 78,061,814.64

Azure 0 24,167,781.72 72,503345.16

GCP 0 22,038,250.08 66,114,750.24

VMware vRealize 16,189,940 3,697,912 27,283,676

Red Hat OpenStack

13,363,000 4,957,600 28.235,800
Platform

Charmed OpenStack
13,387,000 3,577,000 24,113,000
(self-managed)

Tab. 8. Large-scale TCO estimates.

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 Fig. 3. Large-scale TCO estimates.

In this case, a hybrid/multi-cloud architecture is a must as running all of those

workloads in the public cloud is not economical. The organisation can leverage
the public cloud infrastructure during heavy load periods while hosting the
majority of its workloads in the private cloud. At this scale, it also makes more
sense to hire a dedicated cloud operations team rather than relying on
fully-managed services.

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 Executive summary
Analysing cloud costs is a non-trivial process that requires understanding the
workloads running in the cloud as well as using proper tools to compare costs
across various cloud providers. While the reference pricing from leading public
cloud providers is very similar, the reference pricing in the private cloud space
differs substantially across leading vendors.

While it is not possible to directly reference cloud pricing between public and
private cloud providers, using TCO calculators enables estimating the TCO of the
workloads and making the decision regarding workloads placement based on
economics criteria. Although public clouds continue to be the most cost-efficient
platform for small-scale deployments, using private clouds is more economical at
medium and large scale. Moreover, leveraging a multi-cloud architecture proves
to be the most optimal choice from an economic standpoint.

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