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The paper presents several rather known empirical estimates of the cost of construction and maintenance of data centers for the creation and management of cloud environments. Both capital and operating costs related to the creation of a cloud environment, ensuring the smooth operation of equipment, etc. are taken into account. As in many other economic situations, the scale effect can be observed: relative costs of construction and maintaining large data centers are lower than for small centers. This does not negate the idea of creating small centers. Sure they can be created for other reasons – as corporative entities, to ensure security measures and so on. But relative costs here will be higher, and this have to be taken into account. Some examples of estimates for operating costs are reported, where a significant part may be amortization costs due to the need to regularly update the equipment. When organizing the operation of a distributed system, you need to consider the cost of data exchange. Crude characterization of reasonability of moving the data to a remote computing facility is given as a number of CPU cycles per byte of data.

data center; cloud service; cost estimates