Just when you think the Cloud has finally ushered us into a world of transparency and convenience—pay only for what you use, know exactly what you’re paying for—it turns out that you still might find yourself paying for more than you bargained for with some leading cloud vendors. This holds true for even some of the leading eCommerce websites. If you run an eCommerce website and rely heavily on it, then you can find out more here about enhancing your website and optimising it to the highest level to appeal customers.
For those customers dealing with high volumes of high-value transactions, Amazon Aurora might just cut a bigger hole into your total AWS budget than necessary. While AWS offers a good overall value for web hosting, storage and similar services, its flagship database service will trigger hidden fees once you hit the the fast lane. Typical retail, gaming, social and ad tech companies process thousand of database operations a second. A moderately successful company will pay twice what they anticipate in transaction fees and the euphoria of success will be sobered with loan shark like “Vig”.
Your Business’s Success Will Cost You Extra with Aurora
On the surface, Aurora’s pricing seems straightforward enough. There are no annual licensing fees associated with Aurora and the core monthly fee for a single-node deployment adds up to $26,500 per year.
Unfortunately, as your database operations kick into higher gear and begin handling larger volumes, other charges come into play—seemingly out of nowhere—and begin adding up quickly. Amazon charges for usage of its shared-disk memory. More alarmingly, Aurora’s IOPS expenses can end up being more than the core Aurora deployment cost itself in the aforementioned high-volume, high-value transaction environments; a business seeing 10,000 transactions per second could wind up paying more than $5,000 per month—keep this level up for half a year and you’ve more than doubled your initial Aurora outlay. In our tests, we found that Aurora costed approximately $0.20 per 1 million IOs, which may not sound like much until you consider that 36 million transactions an hour would add more than $60,000 in IO expenditures alone over a year’s time.
Know What You Pay For with ClustrixDB
ClustrixDB’s storage component consists of local solid-state drives (SSDs), for which Clustrix customers pay nothing additional to access. Clustrix customers always know when and what they are adding or subtracting to their overall bill—their tab only fluctuates when they “Flex” up and down by adding and subtracting instances to match ebbing and flowing demand. Success won’t cost the e-commerce, ad tech, gaming or other type of company dealing with large spikes in business extra in the form of IOPS and disk usage fees.
At the end of the day, if there is no transparency in the cost of your IT services consumption, then you are wasting an opportunity to realize one of the Cloud’s true promises, pay for what you need, when you need it—without any hidden fees.