![]() ![]() The more you are spending with a particular cloud provider, the more likely you are able to negotiate further discounts. In addition to the publicly documented discounts listed above, there are opportunities for privately negotiated discounts on a case by case basis. Sustained Use Discount (SUD) Committed Use Discount (CUD) For instances running 24x7 for an entire month, the discount maxes out at 30 percent. Google also offers a sustained use discount that requires no commitment, but offers an automatic discount on each instance type that is running in a region for more than 25 percent of a month. IBM only offers public discounts for monthly usage, which saves about 10 percent over on-demand usage. In all cases, you can decide how much usage to commit, and how much to leave as on-demand. With the recent availability of Azure Reserved Instances, the big three cloud providers-AWS, Azure, and Google-all offer publicly available discounts (reaching as high as 75 percent) in exchange for committing to usage on the cloud provider for a one year or three year period. For example, AWS offers instance families with and without local storage, Azure has decreased the amount of local storage on the most recent generations (although it continues to offer local storage on all instance families), and Google continues to offer no local storage out of the box, making it an “optional add-on” for any VM type. Local disk pricing evolves: Cloud providers seem to be steering users away from a reliance on local disks for instances, and instead pushing toward attached storage.Azure offers per second billing only on container instances. Google has always provided per second billing, but reduced the minimum time billed for an instance from 10 minutes down to 1 minute. Per second billing: AWS moved from per hour to per second billing for EC2 and several other services.Azure introduced Reserved Instances with up to 72 percent savings, AWS added one year Convertible Reserved Instances, and Google introduced one year and three year Committed Use Discounts. Discounting options increase: There are growing opportunities (and challenges) in getting discounts.For example, AWS added the C5 instance family (the next generation for C4 instances) and IBM moved from fully custom options to instance families. New instances for our comparison: Cloud providers continue to add new instances, and in some cases new instance families. ![]() ![]() Of the 26 price points we analyzed for each cloud provider, AWS dropped 19 of 26 prices, Azure dropped 24 of 26 prices, Google dropped 4 of 26 prices, and IBM dropped 26 of 26 prices. While this is a fraction of the total price points, they represent some of the most commonly used instances. Many prices go down: 70 percent of the 104 price points we include in our comparison have fallen since our last comparison in April 2017.There have been a large number of changes in pricing for cloud instances in 2017 alone. When you follow cloud pricing closely, you see how often things change. ![]()
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