As an Architect one thing you are constantly hit with is capacity planning, migration planning, and cost savings meetings. I am sure anyone reading this article has been sitting in their office and someone ask, “Hey could you run some quick estimate numbers on what X would cost if we performed Y?” This article is an example of someone wanting to refresh a App consisting of a certain number of VMs and wanting to know ball park pricing on the different placement options.
My Real World Example
We are going to call the application App1. App1 owner has come to the Architecture team and wants to perform a refresh of their application. They have a certain dollar figure from their budget in mind for this refresh project. The ask from App1 owner is where is the most economical place to refresh their application. The company’s primary cloud provider is Azure but you have a small foot print in AWS as well.
How to Run the Planning Report
Go to Home > Optimize Capacity > What-if Analysis > Migration Planning: Public Cloud
You will come to this screen and as always you need to give your scenario a name. In this case I am call it Test-App1.
Select your Azure Region
If the VMs won’t change at all and you want a like for like sizing then it may be easier to select Import from existing VM and use your app code to select the VMs.
If you have new requirements or do not feel like going through and selecting existing VMs then enter the stats.
Your page should look something like this and select Run Scenario
You will need to select your onprem datacener and the cluster as a comparison.
Remember how I said we would also take a look at AWS costs? This is an easy place to now select the AWS region and click add f you forgot in the previous page.
Now you have your pricing numbers and can save the scenario to refer back to later.
Outcome
It is easy to see that Azure in my scenario was cheaper than AWS but onprem was cheaper than Azure. If the App owner’s primary motivation is financial cost then Onprem is the way to go. However, this is where your recommendations as an architect come into place and price is not always the deciding factor. For instances, there may be services you can leverage in the cloud that you do not have onprem and to bring that service onprem would drive up the cost of the onprem pricing models. If you are just seeking financial comparisons of your onprem vs your public cloud providers this is a quick tool to use.
Summary:
There are a lot of tools out there to dig into calculating cost. Every public cloud provider has their own tool that is updated frequently. I like to use vROPs as a quick eyeball test for estimated cost to toss over to the requesting person prior to performing a deep dive into the exact VMs required, their profiles, and their individual costs. As always, I hope y’all found this helpful.