Nevertheless, some companies have had “good luck” with Reserved Instances. Expedia, for example, has managed to make cost awareness a part of its devops culture, pushing cost forecasting out to individual teams.
Subbu Allamaraju, the company’s vice president of technology, admits that “it is a time-consuming activity for teams to partake in this exercise,” yet still critical because “we realised that the success of our cloud journey depends on being cost efficient.”
Expedia has introduced a process for figuring out how to “top off” its use of Reserved Instances, a process that is both “laborious” and ultimately imperfect: “We...end up consuming a diverse set of ever changing portfolio of instance types in each region. This makes upfront long-term planning to procure RIs impossible.”
This process allows Expedia to balance developer choice against AWS discounts achieved through RIs, yet is such a bother that Allamaraju “can’t wait enough for simplified pricing models designed for elasticity and developer choice.”
Google would argue it need wait no longer.
Cost isn’t the driver
As Miles Ward, director of Solutions for Google Cloud, told Allamaraju over Twitter, “Imagine if all of those smart folks were busy making Expedia better rather than contorting themselves around [AWS] cloud’s restrictions?”
Allamaraju was quick to counter that Expedia’s cloud costing program is much more than optimizing Reserved Instances, but Ward has a point.His primary argument? The cloud “should just be cheaper and easier.”
Google’s approach to cloud pricing includes Committed Use Discounts (still in beta), which are similar to AWS’s Reserved Instances but without the upfront fees or lock-in to a particular instance type, netting up to a 57 percent discount.
But Google’s primary competitive wedge against AWS pricing has been Sustained Use Discounts. Basically, rather than planning for discounts in advance, Google automatically discounts users that run the same workloads over time. As Ward told me, “It’s fully automatic, you cannot screw it up, and no up-front payment.”
This sounds like the premise behind the cloud’s original differentiation: convenience all the way down.
And yet Expedia has stuck with AWS for those same workloads that it’s doing the RI dance to afford. Why? When I followed up with Allamaraju, he stressed that “pricing is just one aspect” of their decision matrix for cloud workloads and, apparently, not the most important.
After all, if cost were the primary driver, Expedia (and everyone else) would simply default to the low-cost leader.
Figuring out who gets to claim low-cost leadership, however, is not so simple, as a Rightscale analysis indicates.
Mapping out the lowest-cost cloud for a particular workload is painful, and even if one manages to gather this insight, cloud portability is a bit of a joke, largely because the cloud vendors are hooking users on differentiated services that don’t easily translate between clouds.
Which brings us back to the cloud price war that wasn’t. Savvy enterprises aren’t looking to the cloud to cut costs. They’re searching for improved business agility, more than anything else. That agility gets tied into specific services on the different clouds.
It’s not that pricing doesn’t matter, but rather that it matters far less than plugging into innovative services that these different clouds offer.
This article originally appeared on InfoWorld.
