Normalized compute hours overview

Normalized compute hours are the approximate hours of compute time that an instance has used. This value is an indicator of how much compute resource is being used in your infrastructure. You can use this value along with the number of instances value to estimate the cost of your public cloud or on-premises infrastructure. Also, you can determine the compute time that is used for the cost that you are paying for your infrastructure.  

Only compute-related services and resources can have the normalized compute hours value. For example, Cloud services such as Amazon EC2, Virtual Machines.

Normalized compute hours calculation

A cloud provider's environment has different types of instances. The compute hours between instances can be compared based on a normalizing instance that is predefined for the cloud provider. 

The normalized compute hours value is based on the normalization factor of this predefined instance type. Normalization factor is a number that is assigned to an instance type and is used to compare the relative values of the instance types. The larger the instance size, the higher is the normalization factor, and vice versa. Every instance type has a normalization factor. 

If the normalization factor for m1.small = 1, then, the normalized compute hours value for 2 hours of compute time of:

One instance of m1.small = 1 x 2 x 1 = 2

10 m1.small instances = 10 x 2 x 1 = 20

The cost of each hour of computation for an instance of a bigger instance type will be more than that for an instance of a smaller instance type. For example, the same number of instances of m1.large instance type will cost you more than m1.small instance type. 

Normalization factors

The normalization factor calculation for an instance type is based on the size of a standard instance type. The configuration of the standard instance type is the same for both the public cloud providers and on-premises infrastructure.

Standard instance type (refvm) configuration:

refvm_cpu = 1

refvm_mem = 2 GB

Normalization factor = max(vCPU/refvm_cpu, vMem/refvm_mem) = max(vCPU/1, vMem/2)

The following tables list the normalization factors per instance type per provider: