How much will I REALLY save on Cloud Computing?

At the Philly Cloud Computing usergroup last night Chris Rolon, a local Azure wiz, showed off a new application from Neudesic called Azure ROI.  This freely available application takes the currently announced Azure pricing and allows you to play with numbers around what your usage would be.  Want to see what it would be like if you added more (or less) storage, messages, etc?  Now you can easily change configurations around and see what your costs would be per day, month or year.

The calculator also offers a Migration Costs and ROI tab that will allow you to see your break even point as well as your up front costs for migrating to the cloud.

The application is written entirely in Silverlight and uses Azure as its back end.  They will be making the source code freely available soon  up on Codeplex for people to download.  They’ve already got a few popular Silverlight/Azure apps up there right now including an Azure Storage Explorer that is worth checking out.

You can check out the Azure ROI Calculator here.

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 07, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 07, 2009
  These are all valid points.  I wanted to try an address some of them. The values you see in the app are just the default placeholders the author put in.  I don't think he was making any assumptions other then using simple values to show the calculations. =)   As far as pricing - please remember the pricing announced is retail and there are already announced partner discounts available.  Azure also allows you to scale up and down on the fly.  So you can not only grow if you see demand but if your traffic is lower for any given amount of time you can actually scale back your instances and pay less.  Something a dedicated resource/fixed cost doesn't give you and extremely valuable for sites such as retail/e-commerce where demand may grow over holiday seasons and shrink at other points.   Lastly - remember this is a v1 release.  Right now the team is heads down making sure Azure is a solid release but have no doubt there will be many more features added moving forward.  I also encourage to experiment with Azure now (its free up till release!) and see what works for you. -Dave    

• Anonymous
  August 19, 2010
  Thanks for this post.  The compelling business case for the cloud is realized by many IT professionals, but determining the return on investment of a technology such as cloud computing can prove to be difficult. Have you encountered the ITX (IT Cloud Transformation) ROI Calculator? It's a free online service which will enable you to quickly estimate how much you stand to save in the cloud, versus on-premise. The program takes into account software applications, servers, data centers and back office functions and determines which would be cheaper with Web-based software applications and how long it would take to achieve ROI. For more info see http://bit.ly/bFsy7X