I'm looking for a reliable tool to help estimate the costs associated with deploying a new application that will be hosted on-premises or in a local data center. Specifically, I need to calculate expenses related to vCPUs, memory, storage, databases, and labor costs for provisioning. Any suggestions on tools that can effectively perform these calculations would be greatly appreciated!
4 Answers
A practical way to estimate your infrastructure costs is to lease a dedicated server and use Proxmox as a test environment. With Proxmox and Ansible, you can spin up VMs, deploy your application, and directly monitor the usage of vCPU, memory, and storage.
When deploying on pre-existing infrastructure, your immediate incremental cost might be zero if you’re not hiring additional staff. However, for a more detailed model, you can consolidate costs like hypervisor maintenance and storage into per-VM or per-GB rates. It’s manageable in Excel, but if you're looking for something more sophisticated, you might consider tools like Apptio, though they can have a steep learning curve.
Honestly, for quick estimates, you can just use Microsoft Excel. It’s flexible and allows you to customize your calculations easily. Just set up a spreadsheet to track your costs for different components and labor.
Consider using Prometheus with Grafana for detailed metrics. If you're working with Kubernetes, tools like OpenCost or Kubecost can be beneficial for tracking the costs, especially within a Kubernetes context.
We tried Kubecost, but it didn't suit our needs fully since we needed visibility across more than just Kubernetes deployments. We found Vantage useful for tracking costs for cloud services alongside Kubernetes.
Excel is fine for basic calculations, but if you want something more tailored to infrastructure, I suggest checking out specific tools.