As part of my recent and ongoing interest in the price of IP Addresses, I'm putting together a site to get live reads on the prices from the 3 big cloud providers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

The site is now live with live data from GCP and is called pricekite.io. The prices for AWS and Azure are current, but do not refresh live from web services. The code is on GitHub.

A few observations and thoughts from the first part of this development:

Azure Permissions

I am currently stuck on the Azure implementation because of permissions. I know the least about Azure permissions, and they turn out to be quite complicated. I have followed the tutorials, but still it doesn't work. By contrast the GCP permissions are very simple to set up and work very cleanly, while allowing you to control access quite granularly.

This appears (on the surface) to be an arifact of legacy Active Directory. Microsoft needs to support a lot of older models that they have developed over the years for large clients, and can't simply abandon the ways of the past. In Google's case they have only the security and permission model developed for GCP with no legacy headaches to worry about. Such is the price of success.

GCP Pricing Details

Under the covers of GCP's pricing platform there are some interesting things to be aware of.

All of the items (and there are many of them) have the ability to be priced at a level of billionths of a dollar, or other currency.

Items are priced by:

• Units - whole units of currency. Such as the USD or other currency.
• Nanos - fractional units of currency equal to 1 billionth of the unit.

Take, for instance, our friend the old, reliable IP v4 Address. In this case, for unused addresses thay are priced at:

0 units and 15,000,000 nanos per hour

This means, that each unused address costs:

$0 + 15,000,000/1,000,000,000 per hour

Or in plain English: $.015/hour or $7.2/month.

Of course the fascinating thing here is the ability to control very fine grained level of pricing. Also, there is evidence that in the future they will be charging per second for some resources. Though I don't believe they do this today.

Next I am going to dive into the AWS implementation and leave my Azure frustrations behind. I'll post another update when I get the AWS pricing working.