Cloud Cost Handbook

This is the repository backing the site hosted at handbook.vantage.sh.

The Cloud Cost Handbook is a free open-source community-supported set of guides meant to help explain the complex pricing of public cloud infrastructure and service providers in "plain English." This guide is open for anyone to contribute their knowledge to the community. Vantage employees will maintain hosting the guide for everyone and ensure that content is relevant and adheres to style guides.

The Cloud Cost Handbook is organized into two sections: general concepts and per-service pages.

• General concepts are meant to cover topics that apply across multiple different infrastructure services.
• Per-service pages are meant to give a brief summary of the service, the pricing dimensions of the service, and optionally, a list of cost concepts as it relates to that service.

Contributing Guidelines

Issues and pull requests (PRs) are welcome for requesting or contributing content. Vantage employees will review all issues and PRs to ensure we're keeping content relevant and up to standard. You're welcome to get in contact with us on our Slack Community as well where we have a devoted #cloud-cost-handbook channel for discussion as it relates to the handbook.

Installing Dependencies

This site uses mkdocs. Install the following requirements:

pip install --user mkdocs
pip install --user mkdocs-material

Making and Reviewing Changes

Prior to opening a pull request, please review your changes locally:

1. Create a separate feature branch, based on the master branch, and add your changes.
2. From your feature branch, run mkdocs serve.
3. Access and review your changes locally at http://localhost:8000/.
4. Open a PR and we will review your request as well as suggest any other changes.

Deploying

Once a PR is merged to the master branch, this will trigger a GitHub Actions workflow, which will deploy the site to GitHub Pages. To deploy the site locally, run:

mkdocs gh-deploy --ignore-version

Keep Up To Date

Feel free to watch/star this repo as we're looking to update the site regularly with additional services and concepts. Vantage also works on the following relevant projects:

• EC2Instances.info: An open-source tool for comparing EC2 instance prices and configurations.
• cur.vantage.sh: A dictionary for AWS billing codes present in the AWS cost and usage report.
• The AWS Cost Leaderboard: A hosted site of the top AWS cost centers.
• Vantage: A cloud cost transparency platform.