Yesterday we posted about the benefits of using Cloud-A for your testing, development and quality assurance environments. We highlighted some of the features and functionality that Cloud-A provides to enable fast time to market for your software product, elasticity for growth and quality assurance, but now we are going to prove the business case by looking at the numbers and show you can save over 80% on your test/dev environment by moving to Cloud-A.
Consider the following real world scenario…
Real World Scenario
Our team recently helped a customer through the exercise of finding their true costs for their new utility billed cloud infrastructure. Together, we mapped out a testing, development and quality assurance environment over a three year period with the following requirements.
| Test Environment | Development Environment | QA Environment |
| 1 x 1GB Web Server | 1 x 1GB Web Server | 1 x 2GB Web Server |
| 1 x 2GB Database Server | 1 x 2GB Database Server | 1 x 4GB Database Server |
| Usage: 20 hour per week | Usage: 40 hour per week | Usage: 40 hour per week |
On-premise Hardware Test/Dev/QA Model
Many organizations procure expensive, on-premise hardware for their testing, development and quality assurance environments. In addition to the up front capital costs, ongoing hardware management and initial capacity planning are things to consider.
Considerations
- Fixed overhead cost
- Initially under utilized
- Eventually over utilized
- Hardware failures are users responsibility
- Slow, manual VM deployment
- No APIs
| Capital Purchase | Total Cost |
| Dell PowerEdge R420 – 8 core, 32GB RAM, 2.4TB (spec’ed for growth) | $12,674.00 |
| VMware vSphere Standard | $1,465.50 |
| Total monthly cost | $392.74 |
| Cost per year | $4,712.83 |
| Total cost over 3 years | $14,138.50 |
Traditional Hosted VM Test/Dev/QA Model
The Canadian “cloud” market is dominated by VMware based virtualization platforms that lock users into expensive contracts. While the responsibility of managing hardware is offloaded in this model, VM deployment is often slow and users incur monthly fixed costs.
Considerations
- Locked into contracts
- Slow VM deployment, often requires service provider intervention
- No APIs
- No Utility Billing
| VM Quantity | Flavour | Price per VM | Total Cost (monthly) |
| 2 | 1GB | $50.00 | $100.00 |
| 3 | 2GB | $77.50 | $232.50 |
| 1 | 4GB | $160.00 | $160.00 |
| Total monthly cost | $492.50 |
| Cost per year | $5,910.00 |
| Total cost over 3 years | $17,730.00 |
Cloud-A Test/Dev/QA Model
Cloud-A offers a flexible, agile and elastic environment for testing, development and quality assurance. Users only pay for what they use and incur a nominal storage charge when their stacks are turned off, resulting in dramatic cost savings.
Considerations
- No contracts, no lock-in
- Rapid VM deployment
- API driven infrastructure
- Utility Billing
- Agile and Elastic
- Scale cost with growth
Cloud-A Total Monthly Compute Cost
| VM Quantity | VM Flavour | Usage Hours per month | Hourly Cost | Total Cost |
| 2 | 1GB | 240 | $0.0347 | $8.33 |
| 3 | 2GB | 400 | $0.0554 | $22.16 |
| 1 | 4GB | 160 | $0.0832 | $13.31 |
Cloud-A Total Offline Storage Cost (based on 720 hour months)
| VM Quantity | VM Flavour | Root Disk | Offline Storage Hours | Hourly Cost | Total Cost |
| 2 | 1GB | 30GB | 480 | $0.00035 | $5.04 |
| 2 | 2GB | 60GB | 420 | $0.00035 | $8.82 |
| 1 | 4GB | 80GB | 560 | $0.00035 | $15.68 |
| Monthly compute cost | $43.80 |
| Monthly offline storage cost | $29.54 |
| Total monthly cost | $73.34 |
| Cost per year | $880.08 |
| Total cost over 3 years | $2,640.24 |
Average savings with Cloud-A: 83% or $4,431.31 per year
When comparing the cost of the same testing, development and quality assurance environment from this real world example on on-premise hardware, traditional VM hosting provider and Cloud-A, Cloud-A on average provides 83% savings or $4,431.31 per year.