22 articles on multi cloud — what drives the cost, how it is priced, and where the savings actually are.
Before a single pod schedules, most managed Kubernetes clusters bill a flat hourly fee for the control plane. It is small per cluster and enormous across a fleet of fifty. Here is what each provider charges and how to stop paying it fifty times.
A cheaper price list is the smallest part of a cloud-to-cloud move. Egress, engineering time, dual-running, retraining, and rewritten managed services usually dominate. Here is how to model the whole thing before committing.
Connecting workloads across clouds means egress on both sides plus interconnect or VPN cost, so data moving between clouds is billed twice and adds latency. Minimizing cross-cloud data movement is the main lever. Here is how.
Cloud HPC trades a capital cluster purchase for pay-as-you-go compute, so cost is driven by node type, job runtime, and utilization. Spot, scale-to-zero, and efficient jobs make it economical. Here is how the cost works.
AWS Secrets Manager charges per secret per month plus API calls; Azure Key Vault and GCP Secret Manager charge mostly per operation with cheap or free storage; self-hosted Vault trades license or ops cost. This compares the models.
AWS WAF charges per web ACL, per rule, and per million requests; Azure WAF and GCP Cloud Armor bundle differently (policy plus per-rule plus requests). The cheapest depends on rule count and traffic. This compares the models.
AWS Shield Standard is free with Advanced a flat monthly commitment; Azure DDoS Protection is a flat plan or per-IP; GCP relies on always-on network protection plus Cloud Armor. The models differ sharply. This compares them.
SIEM cost is dominated by data ingestion: Microsoft Sentinel bills per GB ingested (with commitment tiers), AWS Security Lake centralizes data in S3 with usage-based analytics, and Google Chronicle prices differently. Ingestion volume drives all. This compares them.
AWS ECR and GCP Artifact Registry price per GB stored plus egress; Azure ACR uses a flat daily tier fee bundling storage. The cheapest depends on registry size and pull topology. This compares the models and the shared levers.
CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, and Google Cloud Monitoring all bill on metrics, logs ingested, and API calls, with generous free tiers for platform metrics. Logs and custom metrics drive the bill. This compares them and the shared levers.
AWS Secrets Manager charges per secret per month plus API calls; Azure Key Vault and GCP Secret Manager charge mostly per operation with tiny per-secret fees. The cheapest depends on secret count vs access frequency. This compares them.
AWS API Gateway, Azure API Management, and GCP's API Gateway/Cloud Endpoints price API management differently, per-request vs tiered subscription vs per-call. The cheapest depends on volume and feature needs. This compares them.
AWS (ALB/NLB), Azure (Load Balancer, Application Gateway), and GCP (Cloud Load Balancing) price load balancing on hourly plus capacity/data axes. Layer-4 is cheaper than layer-7. This compares them and the shared choice of layer to your needs.
CloudFront, Azure Front Door, and Google Cloud CDN price content delivery similarly, egress to users (tiered by region) plus requests, with free origin-to-CDN transfer. The cheapest depends on traffic geography and volume, and a CDN usually lowers total cost.
Redshift, BigQuery, and Synapse price data warehousing on different axes, provisioned nodes or serverless, per-TB-scanned or per-slot, per-DWU. The cheapest depends on query pattern and volume, not the platform. This compares the models.
DynamoDB, Firestore, and Cosmos DB price NoSQL differently, DynamoDB per capacity or request, Firestore per operation, Cosmos per request unit or serverless. The cheapest depends on read/write mix and traffic shape. This compares the models.
AWS RDS, GCP Cloud SQL, and Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server price managed Postgres similarly, compute per vCPU and memory, storage, and high-availability options. The cost drivers and levers are shared. This compares them.
AWS EBS, Azure Managed Disks, and GCP Persistent Disk price block storage similarly, by provisioned capacity and performance tier, with the fastest tiers charging for provisioned IOPS. This compares them and shows the shared optimization levers.
EKS, AKS, and GKE all charge for the worker nodes; the difference is the control-plane fee (EKS and GKE charge per cluster-hour, AKS's standard tier is free) and autopilot-style options. This compares them and where the real cost lives.
SQS, Google Pub/Sub, and Azure Service Bus price messaging differently, SQS per request, Pub/Sub per TiB of throughput, Service Bus per operation or messaging unit. This compares the models and the surprises in each.
AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions all bill invocations plus compute (memory times duration), with a free tier. The models are close; the real cost differences come from configuration and the surrounding services. Here is the comparison.
Comparable compute and storage sit in a narrow band across the three clouds. The real differences are egress, the discounts you'll commit to, and managed services. Here's how to compare apples-to-apples.