[ghaff]

I think that's sort of covered by "Is usage predictable for the customer?"

The problem is that I'd probably argue that something like AWS at least somewhat breaks this question (and others). Unless you're only using AWS for something like S3, it's mostly only predictable by trial-and-error and billing alerts. Heck, there are consultants whose full-time job is helping clients with AWS bills.

OK, maybe the big cloud providers are outliers, but they don't even allow you to put caps in place aside from billing alerts and building your own triggers.

[PaulWaldman]

>I think that's sort of covered by "Is usage predictable for the customer?"

I initially thought this too, until reading the content of that point. The emphasis is really predictability in this section, even if usage is consistent, customers will have a hard time trusting it if they don't understand what it is based on.

Cloud providers are generlaly selling to technical customers. But you need to make sure you pick metrics that your customers understand. If you were selling a recipe system and your target market is restaurants and chefs, would you charge for PostgreSQL table usage or the number of recipes that can be stored?

Saying you can store 100MB of table data, but that should fit for your 100 recipes, is different than directly specifying that your plan includes 100 recipes. Even if the customer plans on never actually having more than 80 recipes.

[ghaff]

I think that's fair but it also depends on the product. Something like Stripe, per transaction is a very obvious variable metric--and, even better more transactions is almost certainly a good thing for a merchant. A metric based on MB transmitted or API calls would be pretty silly.

AWS is inherently much harder to tie to non-technical measures. Yes the customers are more technical but that doesn't mean AWS formulas are necessarily predictable for them.