Preisvorteile durch frei konfigurierbare Instanzen im Rahmen des Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing allows users to be exempted from personally operating their IT systems, and alternatively purchase a service of external providers over the Internet. In fact, in Cloud Computing higher initial fixed costs have been replaced by hourly or even minute by minute rental costs. This study deals with the deployment of so-called instances which are virtual servers through IaaS providers. Traditionally, IaaS providers offer their customers several preconfigured instances of different standard sizes. Furthermore, the first IaaS providers enabled the free configuration of instances. In this case, customers are now able to individually set the size of their instances effectively base on their performance requirements. This studies emphasizes the assessment of IaaS products that offer preconfigured and custom instances and compares their prices and compares the pricing of major providers such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Profitbricks. In fact, our analysis scopes the price differences between providers as well as between pre-configured and custom instances. As a central result of this study it was established that customers who use custom instances can achieve significant cost benefits. Depending on the considered type of instance and the provider, the price advantage averages between 10 % to 34 %.