Cost Management on Commercial Cloud Platforms

Commercial cloud platforms are a powerful technology for astronomical research. Despite the benefits of cloud computing -- such as on-demand scalability and reduction of systems management overhead -- confusion over how to manage costs remains, for many, one of the biggest barriers to entry. This confusion is exacerbated by the rapid growth in services offered by commercial providers, by the growth in the number of these providers, and by storage, compute, and I/O metered at separate rates -- all of which can change without notice. As a rule, processing is very cheap, storage is more expensive, and downloading is very expensive. Thus, an application that produces large image data sets for download will be far more expensive than an application that performs extensive processing on a small data set. This Birds of a Feather (BoF) session aimed to quantify the above statement by presenting case studies of the costing of astronomy applications on commercial clouds that covered a range of processing scenarios; these presentations were the basis for discussion by the attendees.