A mental model for on-demand pricing
Background
Cost optimization is a constant concern in cloud architecture. Cloud vendors often obfuscate costs or frame costs in unhelpful ways. Changing the way you think about cloud computing costs can be a really helpful way towards getting your bill under control. In this post I discuss a strategy for deciding how many instances to reserve when auto-scaling.
Escape marketing the narratives
The first trick cloud marketers pulled off was to get everyone thinking about computing costs using the on-demand pricing as a baseline. This lets them frame reserved instances as a discount or a savings; they are giving you a deal!
Avoid this style of thinking.