Google Cloud Platform Blog: Google Compute Engine TCO Tool: Validated!

Google Cloud Platform Blog

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Google Compute Engine TCO Tool: Validated!

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

We’ve answered and raised a lot of questions (keep ‘em coming) with our cloud pricing posts (Compute, Local SSDs, Data Warehouses, NoSQL) and have seen growing interest in our TCO tools (Compute Engine and Nearline so far…) but today we want to share some news about the TCO tool we used to make our pricing comparisons: it passed the accuracy test!
It’s one thing to have Google engineers review in painstaking detail the minutiae of our TCO comparison versus AWS to ensure that our comparison is fair and unbiased, founded on correct mathematics and built on reasonable assumptions about the behavior of these types of systems. But to help validate our approach and assess our tool with the most objectivity, we retained an independent third party, with a different background and context, to review this same body of work.
Nucleus Research – a technology research firm that has published numerous ROI technology case studies and is registered with the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA) – took a comprehensive pass through our application, modelling and code base to ensure that our tool correctly computes the TCO of both Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and AWS systems. Nucleus’ depth of experience in TCO and ROI research provided significant benefit in this analysis, which evaluated not just our math, but the foundational assumptions that underpin our model.

Here’s how Ian Campbell, CEO at Nucleus, summed it up:
“Nucleus Research reviewed Google’s internally developed total cost of ownership (TCO) modeling tool for accuracy and completeness and found that the Google Cloud Platform TCO tool is an accurate calculation of the comparative costs of Google Cloud Platform versus Amazon Web Services.”
So our model is legit? “Yup, legit.” he said.
We know customers have lots of questions about this model, which in many cases shows a 40% or greater cost advantage for systems running on GCP versus AWS, and that’s a number that’s hard to ignore. Try out our TCO tool with your own workload values, with your analysis of the market dynamics; we think you’ll find it a useful way to think about how the cloud can add value to your business.
- Posted by Miles Ward, Global Head of Solutions, Google Cloud Platform