Hi, my name is Margot and today I want to talk about infrastructure cost for hosting cloud development environments for your developers.
This is a topic that often comes up very early in conversations about cloud development environments and is often a significant worry especially for companies that want to host cloud development environments for the developers in their own infrastructure.
So in their own cloud accounts, there is a worry that infrastructure costs for providing each developer with their own environment will be significant and will come in on top of licencing cost.
So let’s take a look at the numbers. I created the cost estimates for AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, and I assume the most expensive way of providing cloud development environments, which is to actually provide full dedicated virtual machines for each developer as a cloud development environment.
There are cheaper options, for example when you provide them as containers of pods within a Kubernetes cluster where resources can be shared across a larger number o developers. But in order to take a look at like the maximum amount of cost you can expect, I chose to do an estimate for full virtual machines so one virtual machine as a cloud development environment per developer.
A normal full time developer is in the office or at work approximately 160 hours per month. So this is what I used as the basis of my estimate.
I will go from the cheapest to the most expensive and the cheapest option to host this is actually with Amazon Web Services where you can expect about € 22 per month for a t4g.xlarge-machine, which is 4 cores, 16 gigabytes of RAM and for the 160 hours in the Stockholm region. I did all of this for Central European regions or Northern European regions, which are the ones that that we use for our hosting. So AWS € 22 for 160 hours per month for a developer using a CDE virtual machine.
On Azure, this comes in at € 26 and 92 cents, so slightly more expensive for a machine with four cores and eight gigabytes of RAM. These are the standard machine types that also when you look at different CDE vendors, typically they offer a 4 core, 8 gigabyte RAM as the standard machine. Sometimes a bit smaller, sometimes a bit bigger, but that’s pretty much approximately the standard. So € 26.92 or approximately € 27.00 in Sweden Central with Azure.
Now Google Cloud asks a slightly more – € 27.41 for a four core 8 gigabyte RAM n1 custom machine in Belgium. But all of this is with pay as you go pricing. So the most expensive way of paying for cloud compute. If you are looking to actually provide cloud development environments for a large number of developers over a longer period of time, this is not what you would be actually paying. Rather there are different types of discounts applied to on this cost, for example, committed use or sustained use discounts. So if we take Google Cloud again, the most expensive provider when you go for pay as you go pricing. Then if you apply a one year committed use to this, then the € 27.00 come down already to € 17.00. And if you apply a three-year committed use, it’s € 12 and 33 cents, a whopping € 12 and 33 cents per developer per month for a full virtual machine is a dedicated cloud development environment for the developer.
So I hope with this I can show that infrastructure cost is totally manageable even if you were to pay for the most expensive way of providing CDEs with the most expensive payment model, which is pay as you go pricing, you can expect about € 22.00 to € 27.00 per month of infrastructure cost with normal discounts applied this comes down to € 12/15/17, maybe € 20 per month per developer depending a little bit on your cloud hosting provider and of course the usage patterns of your developers.
Learn more about CDEs:
- Cloudomation DevStack – our CDE product
- CDEs: The ultimate guide – all you need to know about CDEs
- Whitepaper: Full list of CDE vendors (+ feature comparison table)
