Which cloud services are offered at no additional cost?

It is worth noticing, that in the cloud you are not only paying for service you purchase. There are plenty of services, that are offered in the cloud as complementary to already used services. Such services alone will not bring any value. A monitoring service will not bring any benefit without workloads in the cloud. Note, that sometimes those can be fully functional tools like services to enforce policies. However, in some cases, you just receive basic version, and in order to leverage full customization, you need to pay. So, what can we expect?

Maintenance

First of all, you do not have to take care of any underlying hardware. While purchasing the service, all the things below the product you purchased is out of your worries. No need plan datacenter maintenance, ensuring that you have enough computing power like RAM or CPU. You do not have to do any planning of storage capacity.

Monitoring

The next feature offered within the standard costs is monitoring. It is popular to have the basic level of monitoring service for your resources. The more advanced features often may come with additional costs or to be combined with other services.

Cloud Platform health information

Cloud Service Provides take care of data centers, on which their services are running. Therefore, it is crucial to be up to date with cloud platform’s health status. With this you can detect any disruption to the services you are planning to use or utilizing.

Support Service

You can expect to have some basic level of support within cloud. This is a helpful feature that allows you submitting any tickets in case problems with the cloud platform arises.

Security services

Security in public cloud is crucial aspect. Cloud Service Providers offer some basic set of security practices included free of charge. This can be related to scanning of your environment and providing the scoring of your systems. This can be done in line with widely known and respected standards like ISO, NIST or CIS benchmarks. But also this can be a result of Cloud Service Providers guidance.

Multi-Factor Authentication

While writing about security services, I cannot miss Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). This is crucial security aspect. Of course not MFA related functionalities are available with basic option. E.g. you can have limits with what can be a second factor authentication next to password. The choices may be narrowed only to authenticator apps, and with paid option you can have additionally options like phone call, SMS etc.

Security of physical infrastructure

As mentioned above, not only maintenance of datacenter workloads is something that Cloud Service Providers take care of. There are also all necessary security measures that need to be applied to physical location.

DDoS protection

The basic DDoS feature for the platform often is part of basic offering. You are not able to configure it specifically for your resources or apps (this is the privilege for the customers that paid for advanced version), but still your environment is protected.

Limiters

In the cloud you can go wild with the costs pretty fast. Therefore, Cloud Service Providers often apply some safety measures that set kind of threshold that prevents you for generating tremendous costs. This can be done e.g. by limiting number or types of resources you can deploy. As you probably heard ‘sky is the limit’, but with the cloud costs, probably this is not the best motto to follow.

Cost management tools

It is popular to see in cloud environment solutions or services that allows you to manage your expenditures properly.

Advisory services

While I wrote about services to manage your costs, or limiters to prevent you from high costs, I should mention advisors. In the cloud, often you can receive suggestions how to optimize your workloads in the cloud. This may be related to cost optimization, but it may be related to security or performance of your workloads.

Policy enforcement

In every environment proper governance is quite important. Every company definitely has security controls, standards or principles that must be followed. Cloud Service Providers offer the service where you can create the policy, either from available templates or create your custom ones. This helps to maintain the consistency of the security of your environment.

Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Often this is related to basic features of Identity and Access Management. However this is the core of building you environment. With more complexity needed, or specific integrations required, probably basic tier will not be sufficient.

Cost pricing calculators

Web services where you can plan your expenses in advance. You can pick the services that you want to deploy with your desired configurations. This allows you to assess your costs before doing the deployment.

Tags

This is the feature that enables you to label your resources. This can be specifically helpful for grouping and managing your resources or apply automation. More about tagging you can read in 10 Considerations for tagging strategy for cloud resources – CyNe.pl.

Summary

Every day new services come to cloud offering. However, the aim was to highlight how many different features are available in the cloud platforms at no additional costs.