Omtzigt's "Comparing Cloud Web Services"

I found "Comparing Cloud Services" by Theodore Omtzigt to be an excellent read. An excerpt:

"In my continued quest to build an operational model that properly accounts for the costs of different cloud web services, I have reached back to the visual vocabulary of operational analysis. If it was good enough to build BMC Software I figured it would be good enough for this task.

The following figure captures the typical resources in a modern data center. In the vocabulary of operational analysis we have servers and transactions, and the diagram depicts the read and write transactions going into different services such as filers or Internet, and read responses coming out. If you would build your own data center these servers and services would reflect all your capital and operational expenditures.

Different data centers select different resources to monetize. This makes the comparison between different providers so difficult: they are all selling something different. 

Let's start with Amazon as the baseline since AWS tries to monetize all the resources in its data center, except for the internal routers. The next diagram shows the resource costs that Amazon charges you when running an application on their data centers."

Read the full article on http://smartdatacollective.com/Home/16828