How cloud billing works

Pixel has grown up. Page loads go to two medium web servers ($0.046 an hour each) and a large database server ($0.092 an hour). Photos are served from a managed photo bucket, $0.40 for every million photos it hands out. Each upload calls a thumbnail function, billed per call plus the memory it uses while it runs. (In this sim these are Pixel's own prices — close to real list prices, not quotes.)

Then the first real bill arrives — and nobody can say which line is which. To find out, watch one evening and one night. The dashboard shows each part's cost as a monthly pace: what it would cost if it ran like this all month.