Complex pricing hinders enterprise assessment of AWS, Google and Microsoft cloud IoT hubs

Complex pricing is making it impossible for enterprise IT departments to manually compare the cost of using Amazon, Microsoft and Google’s cloud-based internet of things (IoT) platforms, claims 451 Research.

Owen Rogers, director of the market watcher’s Digital Economics Unit, said the lack of consistency and clarity in how the big three cloud firms price their offerings is making it difficult for enterprises to carry out cost comparisons.

“I would go as far as saying it would be impossible for an enterprise to really understand the pricing implications for IoT as it is now,” Rogers told Computer Weekly.

“Each of the platforms has a completely different pricing model and their own nuances. There are so many variables, and often these variables are tucked away.”

An example of this is how they qualify the type of data that passes between the IoT devices the platform, which – in turn – dictates how much users should be charged.

Some devices send small amounts of data to test whether or not their connection to the IoT platform is still live, and some providers charge users for those whereas others do not.

“Enterprises will need to understand all of the pricing and all of these hidden terms and conditions, and even then – if they understand all of that – they’d need a perfect understanding of how much [data] they are going to consume in the future, and also their use case,” he said.

To emphasise just how complicated a job it is, Rogers said 451 Research has stopped trying to manually track the market itself, and now relies on machine learning-based Python script to carry out its cost analysis research.

“We came to the conclusion that there are nine things that ultimately affect how much each of these [cloud IoT] platforms will cost, and this piece of code will simulate a random pricing scenario based on these nine parameters,” he said.

In total, 10 million different scenarios were modelled using this approach, leading 451 Research to conclude the Microsoft Azure IoT Hub platform is the cheapest to use at scale, while Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) IoT Core offering represents better value for money for smaller deployments.

“Most enterprise scenarios today are within the AWS sweet spot,” said Rogers.  

The Google Cloud IoT Core offering, however, was never found to be exclusively cheaper in any of the 10 million modelled scenarios, but did come in second cheapest in some instances. This is despite it having the simplest pricing model overall.