One Pager Cheat Sheet

• The adoption of cloud computing in companies has enabled them to grow, reduce costs and securely manage their data, with widespread predictions for 94% of internet workloads to be performed on the cloud by 2021.
• Cloud Computing offers PAYG and elastic scaling options which make it cheaper than on-premises, as well as more reliable, since the cloud provider takes responsibility for server and VM breakdowns.
• Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft's Azure all offer cost-effective Cloud Pricing models, including PAYG, Reserved capacity and Volume-based discounts.
• The PAYG model and various discounts and savings options offered by cloud services makes them much more cost-effective than on-premises solutions.
• We will be comparing AWS EC2, Azure, and Google VMs with 4vCPUs and comparable RAM, but note that the memory-optimized and accelerated-computing instances of Google Cloud have higher vCPUs and offer superior memory.
• Google Cloud has the highest price of on-demand pricing for memory-optimized and accelerated-computing instances, due to its 40vCPUs and 12vCPUs in place of the 4vCPUs offered by AWS and Azure.
• Full-priced cloud offerings from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud all come with discounted commitments that can save businesses up to 40% on 1-year Standard RIs, Convertible RIs, and Scheduled RIs, as well as 3-year commitment plans, with Google Cloud being lowest in memory-optimized instances, but relatively more expensive for accelerated computing.
• Google Cloud provides the most cost-effective pricing for memory-optimized instances due to its 1-year commitment plan based on vCPUs/hour and GBs/hour used, making it more competitive than AWS and Azure for 1-year committed/reserved plans.
• AWS provides per-second billing for Linux instances with a minimum of 60 seconds limit in certain supported regions and instance zones.
• Through per-second billing, the traditional cloud providers AWS, Azure and Google Cloud are making it easier for developers to focus on their code and event triggers, by charging them in increments of 100 milliseconds.
• AWS offers volume-based discount pricing with a fixed rate for bulk orders, making it beneficial for customers who need to make large-scale or frequent usage of its services.
• The big three of cloud vendors, AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform, offer businesses a number of options to choose from, but the race for supremacy remains uncertain.
• Azure's Cloud pricing model offers users the ability to save money over the course of a three-year commission by adding resources on-demand and taking advantage of cost-saving features, while also reducing the risk associated with committing to a cloud infrastructure vendor backed by Microsoft.
• Microsoft's Azure provides flexible and cost effective memory-optimised offerings to users as part of its cloud pricing plans.