Public vs private cloud usage costs
Ioannis Konstantinou, Evangelos Floros, Nectarios Koziris · 2012
Cloud computing claims to offer multiple advantages comparing to "traditional" computing infrastructures. These include among others: energy efficiency, reduction of the overall administration costs, better utilization of hardware resources by co-hosting multiple services environments, etc. This paper reports on the experience gained during the provision of an IaaS cloud service in the context of the StratusLab project and provides quantitative economic analysis of the total cost of ownership of such infrastructure by calculating the infrastructure, maintenance and operational cost. The analysis continues with the cost comparison of the private cloud against the popular Amazon's EC2 public cloud service by utilizing the collected StratusLab usage traces for a period of one year. It is shown that with an average utilization of 70%, a small cluster of 20 machines could amortize its total cost in a period of 2-3 years while offering the same rates compared to Amazon cloud if it were offered on a pay-as-you go basis.