It has been a little over a month since Amazon and Google switched some of their cloud services to per-second billing and so the first invoices with the revised billing are hitting your inboxes right about now. If you are not seeing the cost savings you hoped for, it may be a good time to look again at what services were slated for the pricing change, and how you are using them.

Google Cloud Platform

Starting with the easiest one, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), you may not be seeing a significant change, as most of their services were already billing at the per-minute level, and some were already at the per-second level. The services moved to per-second billing (with a one-minute minimum) included Compute Engine, Container Engine, Cloud Dataproc, and App Engine VMs.  Moving from per-minute billing to per-second billing is not likely to change a GCP service bill by more than a fraction of a percent.

Let’s consider the example of an organization that has ten GCP n1-standard-8 Compute Engine machines in Oregon at a base cost of $0.3800 per hour as of the date of this blog. Under per-minute billing, the worst-case scenario would be to shut a system down one second into the next minute, for a cost difference of about $0.0063. Even if each of the ten systems were assigned to the QA or development organization, and they were shut down at the end of every work day, say 22 days out of the month, your worst-case scenario would be an extra charge of 22 days x 10 systems x $0.0063 = $1.3860. Under per-second billing, the worst case is to shut down at the beginning of a second, with a highest possible cost for these same machines (sparing you the math) being about $0.02. So, the best this example organization can hope to save over a month with these machine with per-second billing is $1.39.

Amazon Web Services

On the Amazon Web Services (AWS) side of the fence, the change is both bigger and smaller.  It is bigger in that they took the leap from per-hour to per-second billing for On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot EC2 instances and provisioned EBS, but smaller in that it is only for Linux-based instances; Windows instances are still at per-hour.

Still, if you are running a lot of Linux instances, this change can be significant enough to notice.  Looking at the same example as before, let’s run the same calculation with the roughly equivalent t2.2xlarge instance type, charged at $0.3712 per hour. Under per-hour billing, the worst-case scenario is to shut a system down even a second into the next higher hour. In this example, the cost would be an extra charge of 22 days x 10 systems x $0.3712 = $81.664. Under per-second billing, the worst case is the same $0.02 as with GCP (with fractions of cents difference lost in the noise). So, under AWS, one can hope to see significantly different numbers in the bill.

The scenario above is equally relevant to other situations where instances get turned on and off on a frequent basis, driving those fractions of an hour or a minute of “lost” time. Another common example would be auto-scaling groups that dynamically resize based on load, and see enough change over time to bring instances in and out of the group. (Auto-scale groups are frequently used as a high-availability mechanism, so their elastic growth capabilities are not always used, and so savings will not always be seen.) Finally, Spot instances are built on the premise of bringing them up and down frequently, and they will also enjoy the shift to per-second billing.

However, as you look at your cloud service bill, do keep in mind some of the nuances that still apply:

• Windows: GCP applies per-second billing to Windows; AWS is still on one-hour billing for Windows.
• Marketplace Linux: Some Linux instances in the AWS Marketplace that have a separate hourly charge are also still on hourly billing (perhaps due to contracts or licensing arrangements with the vendors?), so you may want to reconsider which flavor of Linux you want to use.
• Reserved instances: AWS does strive to “use up” all of the pre-purchased time for reserved instances, spreading it across multiple machines with fractions of usage time, and per-second billing can really stretch the value of these instances.
• Minimum of one-minute charge: Both GCP and AWS will charge for at least a minute from instance start before per-second billing comes into play.

Overall, per-second billing is a great improvement for consumers of cloud resources…and will probably drive us all more than ever to make each second count.

With AWS re:Invent done and dusted for another year, naturally the majority of coverage has focused on the initiatives coming out of Amazon’s headquarters. There were plenty of them too – more than 20 announcements in Andy Jassy’s keynote alone, with topics ranging from machine learning, databases, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Yet plenty more news came from the event’s many partners. First up was something of a continuation, between Amazon Web Services and VMware. First announced last year and made available in August, the two companies’ collaboration, VMware Cloud on AWS, has been extended and expanded. More VMware capabilities have been plugged in, more AWS services are being supported, and availability will be expanded from the US West region, in Oregon, to now include US East in Virginia.

“The momentum for VMware Cloud on AWS is growing rapidly, and VMware and AWS are delivering major new capabilities after only three months of availability while enhancing our strategic relationship with new integrations across our platforms,” said Mark Lohmeyer, VMware vice president and cloud platform business unit general manager. “Customers of VMware Cloud on AWS will be able to migrate application portfolios to the cloud even more rapidly with Hybrid Cloud Extension and AWS Direct Connect, while maintaining the optimal levels of performance, scale, and availability required for mission-critical apps.”

Elsewhere, digital performance and app monitoring provider Dynatrace announced that organisations can monitor performance at the code level across a wider variety of AWS Lambda services. In what is described as an industry first, Alois Reitbauer, vice president at Dynatrace, explained: “Today, people buy and transact business via voice, not just on their laptop or mobile device. Monitoring these transactions at a user level is critical, as without it, you have an increasingly big blind spot.

“It’s similar with IoT; you now have millions of devices that are driving the code that’s being executed in AWS Lambda, so organisations need automated real-time discovery and continuous visibility to deliver proactive performance management and avoid IoT failures,” Reitbauer added.

Stratoscale, on the other hand, is looking more at running and scaling cloud-native applications on-premises. In what was again seen as a first for the industry, the company’s latest product, Chorus, enables app development teams to build cloud-native applications without being limited to the public cloud. The product supports Kubernetes, load balancers, and object storage.

Outside of product announcements, much of the partner news at re:Invent focused around companies getting on board with AWS’ metrics. A new program for AWS’ partner network announced at the event was the AWS Networking Competency, aimed at advanced partners who already provide specialised solutions to help customers adopt, develop and deploy on Amazon’s cloud. Among the 18 partners first announced were Colt, Equinix, and Dome9 Security. Colt said that to achieve recognition partners needed to demonstrate ‘deep AWS expertise’ and be able to ‘deliver solutions seamlessly.’

Read more: AWS takes a musical approach at re:Invent with machine learning, serverless and IoT key

The Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC) has published the latest version of its Practical Guide to Cloud Computing, which aims to give organisations a 10-step roadmap from developing business cases to moving to production.

The report, version 3.0, makes several changes to its predecessor, which was published in 2014, including updates to address maintaining cloud services and data residency management. As well as this, the ‘essential characteristics’ of cloud computing, opening the document, have been altered to reflect characteristics defined in the ISO/IEC 17788 standard.

Plenty has changed in the industry over the past three years. The report has been updated to take into account the likes of serverless computing, containers and microservices technology, as well as hybrid cloud, which wasn’t as ubiquitous a term in 2014 as today.

Yet the general good practice around adoption, governance, and integration remain solid. Take integration with existing enterprise systems – point eight in the 10-step agenda – for example. This is naturally important, if you’re a large organisation with significant investments at stake or if there are some assets which are simply not cloud-ready yet.

The report notes how there are a variety of components which can be considered from both the organisational and cloud service provider side, such as data, process integration and management capabilities, while there are several links in place between cloud services and existing applications. If an organisation has already established a process of adopting open standards for data formats, or communication protocols and APIs, then cloud services integration can be built on top of that. If not, then cloud integration can be used as a baseline for when these standards do appear.

The report offers by way of conclusion a summary of critical keys to success for any organisation embarking on a cloud journey. This includes establishing executive support, addressing organisational change management, establishing commitment, carefully evaluating cloud service agreements, addressing federated governance, handling security and privacy, complying with legal and regulatory requirements, and defining metrics and a process for measuring impact.

Naturally, this is only a guide – the ultimate selection of cloud solutions depends on the abilities of IT and business decision makers – yet the importance of making these moves is key. Analysing the top six benefits of cloud computing, the report notes the ability to achieve economies of scale, reduce CapEx by moving to OpEx, improve access, implement agile development, leverage a more global workforce, and gain access to emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and blockchain.

You can read the full 45-page document here (pdf).

Organizations around the world are struggling to cope with the current data explosion. A vital characteristic of this data is that it is unstructured and represents things like email, images, and videos. Storage of this form of data is typically in an object format which differs significantly from the database norm. Databases housed data grows very slowly because most of it is structured. Object storage formats are now being used to optimize access to large amounts of non-transactional files across a growing number of vertical markets.

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“We’re developing a software that is based on the cloud environment and we are providing those services to corporations and the general public,” explained Seungmin Kim, CEO/CTO of SM Systems Inc., in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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The cloud revolution in enterprises has very clearly crossed the phase of proof-of-concepts into a truly mainstream adoption. One of most popular enterprise-wide initiatives currently going on are “cloud migration” programs of some kind or another. Finding business value for these programs is not hard to fathom – they include hyperelasticity in infrastructure consumption, subscription based models, and agility derived from rapid speed of deployment of applications. These factors will continue to drive cloud adoption into the foreseeable future.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that CrowdReviews.com has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 22nd International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 5–7, 2018, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
CrowdReviews.com is a transparent online platform for determining which products and services are the best based on the opinion of the crowd. The crowd consists of Internet users that have experienced products and services first-hand and have an interest in letting other potential buyers learn their thoughts on their experience.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Telecom Reseller has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 22nd International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 5-7, 2018, at the Javits Center in New York, NY.
Telecom Reseller reports on Unified Communications, UCaaS, BPaaS for enterprise and SMBs. They report extensively on both customer premises based solutions such as IP-PBX as well as cloud based and hosted platforms.

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