1.
Understanding cloud
costs with analytics
Ali Khajeh-Hosseini
@AliKhajeh
Nov 2014, Bristol University
®
®

2.
What is a cloud?

3.
Server

4.
Rack

5.
Container

6.
2500
Servers
Electricity, Water, Internet

7.
Taken from one of Dave Cliff ’s talk on Cloud Computing

8.
a cloud

9.
Scale of operations
Around 60 Staff
30 Megawatts = Perth (Scotland)!
38,500 m2 = 4 ftbl pitches
Microsoft has >1M servers
h#p://web.archive.org/web/20120224062157/h#p://www.microso;.com/Presspass/emea/presscentre/pressreleases/February2012/23-­‐02DublinDataCentre.mspx
h#p://news.microso;.com/speeches/steve-­‐ballmer-­‐worldwide-­‐partner-­‐conference-­‐2013-­‐keynote/

10.
Why do companies care?
Many benefits
- Elasticity & pay-per-use-pricing
- On-demand computing
...

11.
Animoto’s crazy scale-out
Scale-out from 50 to 4,000 servers in 3 days
h#p://blog.rightscale.com/2008/04/23/animoto-­‐facebook-­‐scale-­‐up/

12.
Capacity planning
Images
taken
from
h#p://aws.amazon.com/economics/

13.
Zynga’s Z-Cloud
Launch new games on public clouds
Move to private cloud when usage patterns are understood
h#p://www.rightscale.com/customers/zynga-­‐grows-­‐to-­‐1-­‐social-­‐gaming-­‐site-­‐with-­‐rightscale.php
h#p://code.zynga.com/2012/02/the-­‐evoluNon-­‐of-­‐zcloud/

14.
There are different
public cloud pricing models
Rackspace
IBM SoftLayer
HP
…

15.
Amazon Web Services
Different purchase options
- On-Demand: fixed rate
- Reserved: pay upfront, lower rate
- Spot: Bid how much you would pay
- Discounts and consolidated bills

16.
AWS Reserved Instances
up-front procurement to pay-per-use
You have to specify: term (1/3 yr), utilization, availability zone,
instance type and OS when buying a RI
Image
taken
from
h#p://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/12/reserved-­‐instance-­‐opNons-­‐for-­‐amazon-­‐ec2.html

17.
AWS Reserved Instances Marketplace
Buy and sell reservations

18.
AWS Spot Prices
Bid for an instance, it’ll get switched on if bid >= spot price.
You pay spot price, AWS sets it.
h#p://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~ladypine/spotprice-­‐slides-­‐postmortem.pdf

19.
Example: a MySQL Database
AWS Relation Database Service (RDS)
- Up-front reservation fee (optional)
- CPU: $X/hour (based on instance type and cloud)
- Storage: $X/GB/month
- Transactions: $X/Millions of I/O ops
- Provisioned IOPS: $X/IOPS/month (has other limitations)
- Redundancy: double the CPU hourly rate
- Data transfer: $X/GB (tiered across cloud)

20.
What the heck?
I just wanted a simple database

21.
Google’s sustained usage model
Automatically lower the price of your virtual machines when
you use them to run sustained workloads
Images
taken
from
h#ps://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#sustained_use

22.
Let’s play Tetris
Images
taken
from
h#p://googlecloudplaRorm.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/introducing-­‐sustained-­‐use-­‐discounts.html

23.
The challenge
Cloud spending is growing rapidly
Cloud pricing is complicated…
we scrape over 12,000 prices.
Need to monitor, allocate, forecast & optimize costs
h#p://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2352816

24.
The story so far…
Jan 2009: Started researching cloud cost forecasting in St Andrews
Dec ‘11: With Hassan, we launched PlanForCloud
Jul ‘12: Acquired by RightScale
Nov ‘13: Launched Private-Beta of Cloud Analytics
Mar ‘14: Cloud Analytics goes into Public-Beta
Oct ‘14: Cloud Analytics is Generally Available

25.
Connect to a cloud
We regularly collect data

26.
Slice and dice the data

27.
See historic trends

28.
Forecast costs based on
switching clouds or
increased growth

29.
Who buys our products?
Enterprises like
Sony, EA Games, PBS,
Pearson Publishing, Zynga…

30.
Some