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How It Works
A public cloud provider builds and maintains large-scale data centers, then sells access to that infrastructure as a service. Customers provision what they need, use it, and pay based on consumption. They share the underlying physical hardware with other customers, though each customer’s data and workloads are logically isolated. AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) are the three dominant public cloud providers. Each offers compute, storage, database, and networking services that can be provisioned in minutes without owning any hardware.
Why It Matters for Cloud Cost
Public cloud removes the capital expense of buying and maintaining physical infrastructure, replacing it with variable operating expense. That shift creates flexibility, but it also creates a new cost management challenge. Because resources are billed by use, teams can provision far more than they actually need, and waste compounds quickly if no one is actively monitoring consumption. On-demand pricing, the default billing model for most public cloud services, carries a significant premium over commitment-based pricing options such as AWS Reserved Instances, Azure Reservations, and GCP Committed Use Discounts. Organizations that run primarily on on-demand pricing often overpay by a wide margin compared to those that match committed spend to their baseline workloads.
Usage AI’s Autopilot mode autonomously purchases and adjusts commitments across AWS, Azure, and GCP daily, while CoPilot surfaces savings recommendations for teams that prefer to review before any purchase is executed.