The question of how much would it cost to run CHT comes up fairly regularly and the hosting cost estimation documentation could be improved by being structured as a calculator over time because project context likely changes as discoveries are made and new goals set.
What I’m seeing could be most helpful would be a dynamic page where the input would be initial user count and expected growth rate. Resources required over time for optimal operation would be forecast & displayed on a 2 axis graph together with associated costing for major cloud service providers. The user can experiment with different deployment scenarios for more realistic planning.
Please share thoughts on how total cost of ownership documentation can be enhanced.
I like this line of thinking! Hosting costs will always be something of a moving target as costs and the demands of the system will not remain constant. This probably just makes it even more essential that folks have a way to calculate estimated costs with the greatest possible accuracy.
One idea that I think would be an incremental improvement over the current docs page you have linked would be just a template Google Sheet that could operationalize the calculations from the docs. The idea would be that anyone could make a copy of the sheet and plug in the estimated numbers for their deployment. Then the sheet could show not only the current cost estimates, but could also be sophisticated enough to allow extrapolating to future costs based on some parameters…
Yes - seconding Josh’s interest in the topic - thanks for raising it Elijah! And for sure it can be a moving target. A big challenge that we’ve faced when trying to offer dynamic calculators is not only what’s included and what’s not, but even the costs differences between a bare-metal installation and a cloud installation.
To that end, maybe you can help us out here with some practical use cases? For example, would it be helpful to have a more detailed/interactive calculator based on current Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (AWS EKS) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (AWS EC2) pricing? While helpful for planing an AWS cloud deployment, this likely would not be applicable to a bare-metal installs which would require hundreds and likely tens of thousands of dollars ($USD) of hardware capitol purchased upfront. “Upfront Purchase of Hardware” is very much excluded today!
A more simple solution might be the “T-Shirt sizes” approach, where we add two more “medium” and “large” pricing tables to the existing “small” size already published. Maybe this is more impactful in the immediate term?