Billing and resource consumption
Cloud billing is an accounting of all the metered usage over a given month. Typically, organizations have a single bill for resources consumed every month.
Why resource consumption is important?
We define consumption as an event of using resources provided by whitesky.cloud BV.
Since small inefficiencies can add up quickly when you scale, it is important to understand the nature of your consumption and to use efficient ways to track it. Here we explain the main principles behind resource usage calculation and billing at whitesky.cloud BV to help our customers to optimize their expenses.
To understand cloud consumption, it helps to understand different resource types.
Resource unit types
When you deploy resources in whitesky.cloud BV you typically end up consuming more than one type of consumption units. From the billing perspective we divide units in two types:
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Consumption-based units: Pay as you go. For example, network usage is paid per amount of network transactions and s3 storage is paid for the exact amount of storage that is occupied in the object storage.
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Allocation-based units: These units are paid for allocation, regardless of the actual load. For example, creating a virtual disk of 10 GiB will result in 10 GiB of storage consumption, regardless on the content on the disk. The same logic applies to the memory and vCPUs.
All monthly calculations assume 30 days in a month. All the resources are metered hourly.
Consumption units
The total consumption of your resources is calculated as a composition of the following consumption types
| Unit | Unit Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Compute unit (CU) | Allocation | 1 CU is an equivalent of running a VM with 1vCPU and 4GB of memory. Note that CUs are calculated per VM towards the upper value of the memory / virtual CPU combination. (e.g CU = max(memory in GB/ 4 , vcpus / 2)). CUs are used to calculate WU consumption |
| Virtual CPU unit (VCU) | Allocation | 1 VCU is the equivalent of using 1 unpinned virtual CPU for a month. |
| Memory unit (MU) | Allocation | 1 MU is the equivalent of using 1024MiB of memory for a month. |
| Storage unit (SU) | Allocation | 1 SU is the equivalent of using 1TB of disk storage for a month. |
| Object unit (OU) | Consumption | 1 OU is the equivalent of using 1TB of objectspace storage for a month. |
| Transaction unit (TU) | Allocation | 400 allocated IOPS (input/output operations per second). |
| Public IP Address unit (PIU) | Allocation | 1 assigned public IP Address is an equivalent of using 1 PIU. |
| Windows unit (WU) | Allocation | Charged for all VMs running Windows OS. The number of WUs corresponds to the number of Compute units (CU). 1 compute unit is ~ 1 WU is the equivalent of running a VM with Windows OS with 1 vCPU and 4 GiB of memory in a course of a month. |
| Network unit (NU) | Consumption | Metered based on the total bandwidth consumed. 1 NU is the equivalent of consuming 1TB of traffic from and towards the virtual firewall or the external IP address on your VMs. |
| Virtual Graphics processing Unit (VGU) | Allocation | 1 VGU is the equivalent of using 1 virtual GPU for a month. |
| Flash Storage Unit (FSU) | Allocation | 1 FSU is the equivalent of using 1 TB of flash memory configured on a disk attached to a running VM for a period of one month. |
Factors affect consumption on your VM
- The amount of vCPUs
- The amount of memory
- The total amount of disk storage
- Pinning vCPU to a physical CPU. Consumption of 1 pinned vCPU over a month results in consumption equivalent to 4 VCU units.
- IOPS of the disks
- The total amount of traffic
- Host operating system. For example, running Windows OS will result in extra charges for running the VM itself, plus costs for the licenses reported to the Windows licensing software.
- Additional licensed software. All VMs in our platform are daily scanned for the Windows software installed. Beware that when you are using software that is subject to licensing, extra charges may apply. To see the software that was detected on your VMs navigate to Software licenses in the navigation drawer
- Switching off unused VMs. When the VM is switched off and has status HALTED, consumption will only be charged for SU units, since halted VMs do not claim memory and vCPUs.
Example
VM resources: 2 unpinned vCPU, 4096 MB memory and 100GiB total disk storage, Windows OS installed. Consumption over a month: 1VCU unit, 4MU and 0.5SU, 2WU.