9.1 How cloud pricing actually works
You can read a price page and estimate a monthly bill before you deploy.
Before:01. Cloud Foundations
The same thing, three names
One idea, sold under a different brand by each provider. Learn it once and you can read any job advertisement.
- On AWS
- Savings Plans / Reserved Instances / Spot
- On Azure
- Reservations / Savings Plans / Spot VMs
- On Google Cloud
- Committed Use Discounts / Spot VMs
A cloud bill is arithmetic you can do before deploying, and this topic teaches it: per-second compute, per-gigabyte storage, per-request serverless, and the on-demand, committed and spot purchasing lanes. Egress gets its own item because it is the line that surprises everyone — data leaving the cloud costs money in a way data entering does not. It opens the cost module because every optimisation later assumes you can read a price page and build an estimate with the provider's calculator first.
Work through these
Per-second compute, per-GB storage, per-request serverless
Compute is metered by time, storage by volume held, and request-based services by invocation, and each meter rewards a different design. Recognising which meter dominates your workload is where estimation starts.
On-demand, reserved/committed and spot/preemptible
Paying as you go, committing in advance, or bidding for interruptible capacity are three ways to buy the same computer at very different prices. What you give up in each case is flexibility, and knowing how much matters.
Egress charges: the line item that surprises everyone
Data usually costs nothing to bring in and something to send out, and that asymmetry surprises almost everyone once. It shapes architecture more than most people expect.
Building an estimate with the provider's calculator
Each provider publishes a calculator, and building an estimate before deploying converts a vague worry into a number you can check against later. The exercise also reveals which component dominates.
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