strategy
10 articles on strategy — what drives the cost, how it is priced, and where the savings actually are.
Colocation vs cloud cost: renting a rack or renting instances
Colocation means you own the servers and rent space, power, and cooling in a data center; cloud means you rent capacity by the hour with no hardware. The cost curves cross at a predictable point tied to utilization and scale. Here is when each wins, with numbers.
VMware to cloud cost: what leaving the hypervisor costs
Migrating VMware workloads to the cloud can mean a like-for-like lift onto managed VMware services or a re-architecture to native cloud. Each has a distinct cost profile, and recent VMware licensing changes have sharpened the math. Here is the breakdown.
Why is us-east-1 the cheapest region: the default explained
us-east-1 (N. Virginia) is AWS's oldest, largest region, and it is consistently at or near the lowest prices and the first to get new services. Here is why it earned that status, and when the cheapest region is not the right choice.
Cloud unit economics guide: measuring cost per unit of value
Unit economics ties cloud spend to a business metric, cost per customer, per transaction, per request, so you measure efficiency instead of just total dollars. This guide covers which units to pick, how to compute them, and how to improve them.
Datacenter to cloud cost comparison: capex, opex, and total cost
Comparing on-premise datacenters to cloud means looking past the sticker price to total cost of ownership: hardware, power, staff, utilization, and elasticity. Cloud is not always cheaper, but it shifts the cost shape. Here is how to compare.
Lift and shift vs refactor cost: two paths to the cloud
Lift and shift moves workloads to the cloud as-is for speed, but often carries over-provisioned cost; refactoring for cloud-native services costs more up front but runs cheaper. Here is how to weigh the two.
On-prem to AWS migration cost: what the move actually costs
Migrating from a data center to AWS has a one-time project cost and a new ongoing run cost that replaces your capital spend. Understanding both, and how they compare to on-prem, is essential before you commit. Here is the breakdown.
Cloud unit economics: cost per unit of business value
Unit economics ties cloud cost to business metrics, cost per customer, per transaction, per request, so you measure efficiency, not just total spend. Rising total cost can be healthy if unit cost falls. Here is how to think in units.
Cloud cost per customer: the metric behind gross margin
Cost per customer, cloud spend divided by customers served, drives gross margin in any cloud-hosted product. Knowing it, and reducing it as you scale, is essential to healthy unit economics. Here is how to measure and improve it.
Cost optimization ROI: knowing which savings are worth pursuing
Not every optimization is worth the effort. Weighing the savings against the engineering time and risk, ROI, focuses effort on the high-value wins and avoids over-optimizing trivial costs. Here is how to prioritize.