Getting past cloud cost confusion: How to avoid the vendors' traps and win

Cloud service providers like AWS, Azure, and Google were created to provide compute resources to save enterprises money on their infrastructure. But cloud services pricing is complicated and difficult to understand, which can often drive up bills and prevent the promised cost savings. Here are just five ways that cloud providers obscure pricing on your monthly bill. For the purpose of this article, I’ll focus on the three biggest cloud service providers: AWS, Azure, and Google. Between these three cloud providers alone, different terms are used for just about every component of services offered.For example, when you think of a virtual machine (VM), that’s what AWS calls an “instance,” Azure calls a “virtual machine,” and Google calls a “virtual machine instance.” If you have a scale group of these different machines, or instances, in Amazon and Google they’re called “auto-scaling” groups, whereas in Azure they’re called “scale sets.”There’s also different terminology for their pricing models. AWS offers on-demand instances, Azure calls it “pay as you go,” and Google has “on-demand” resources that are frequently discounted through “sustained use.” You’ve also got “reserved instances” in AWS, “reserved VM instances” in Azure, and “committed use” in Google. And you have “spot instances” in AWS, which are the same as “low-priority VMs” in Azure, and “preemptible instances” in Google.