Cloud Computing: Cost Calculators
The Azure Pricing Calculator provides a point and click menu and wizard style driven approach to calculating your Azure cloud costs. Further than including typical costs on VM sizing, storage costs and other services, it provides a comprehensive pricing catalog for PaaS offerings and services available from the Azure Storefront, thus making it highly extensible. While this does cover all of the necessary pricing calculation needs, the downside to this approach is a move away from a single-view worksheet that we see in the AWS calculators, which benefits more advanced users due to the reduction in clicks and page refreshes. However for the relative newcomer on cloud platform pricing Microsoft’s approach provides a reasonable level of intuitive hand-holding in determining costing for cloud initiatives. This approach would be a welcome alternate addition to the AWS calculators reviewed in this course to assist those that are newer to the platform; while not removing the existing interface for more advanced users.