# Cloud Cost and Capabilities¶

Qhub does not charge a fee for infrastructure but cloud providers themselves have pricing for all their services. A digital ocean cluster’s minimum fixed cost is around $$60/month. While other cloud providers fixed cost is around$$200/month. Each cloud vendor has different pricing and capabilities of their kubernetes offerings which can significantly affect the pricing of QHub. Cost alone does not determine which cloud is best for your use case. Often times you cannot choose the cloud that QHub runs on. In this case this document can help determine a reasonable cost for running QHub. Keep in mind these numbers are a simplified view of pricing and will not reflect your actual bill.

## Kubernetes¶

Often cloud providers have a fixed cost for using kubernetes. Here we try to provide a table of capabilities of each cloud kubernetes offering along with costs.

Cloud

Pricing

Scale to 0?

Spot/Premptible?

GPUs

Digital Ocean Kubernetes

0

No

No

No

$75/month Yes Yes Yes Amazon Web Services$75/month

No

Yes

Yes

Azure AKS

$75/month Yes Yes Yes ## Network Costs¶ All cloud providers charge for traffic leaving their cloud (known as egress). Additionally QHub will setup a single load balancer that all traffic goes through. Cloud Egress Load Balancer Digital Ocean$0.01/GB

$10/month Google Cloud Platform$0.12-0.08/GB

$200/month Amazon Web Services$0.09-0.05/GB

$20/month Azure$0.08-0.05/GB

$20/month ## Storage Costs¶ Cloud providers provide many different types of storage. The include S3 like (object storage), Block storage, and traditional filesystem storage. Note that each type of storage has well known advantages and limitations. • Object storage is optimized for cost, bandwidth, and the cost of latency for file access (which directly affects the number of IOPs S3 is capable of). Object storage will always provide the highest bandwidth. It does provide parallel partial access to files. • Block storage is equivalent to a physical disk attached to your machine. Block storage offers high IOPs for latency sensitive filesystem operations. They offer high bandwidth similar to object storage but at around 2-4 times the cost. • Filesystem storage enables shared filesystems between multiple compute notes but at significant cost. NFS filesystem have significantly lower IOPS than block storage and significantly lower bandwidth than object storage. Usually this option is chosen due to needing to share files between multiple machines. This offering should be a last choice due to costing around$0.20/GB.

Cloud

Object

Block

Filesystem

Digital Ocean

$0.02/GB$0.10/GB

N/A

$0.02/GB$0.4-0.12/GB

$$0.20-0.30/GB (1TB minimum$$200)

Amazon Web Services

$0.02/GB$0.05-0.12/GB

$0.30/GB Azure$0.02/GB

$0.6-0.12/GB$0.16/GB

Note that these prices can be deceptive to compare. Each cloud providers offering have wildly different guaranteed IOPs, burst IOPS, guaranteed bandwidth, and burst bandwidth.

## Compute Costs¶

Cloud providers have huge offerings of compute instances. And this guide could not do it all justice. In order to compare the clouds as best as possible we will chose their standard 4 cpu/16 GB ram offering for comparison. This should give a ballpark of the cost of running a compute instance. Note that all compute instances need an attached block storage usually at lest 10 GB. Comparing cpus is not a fair comparison due to computer architecture and clock rate.

Cloud

4GB/16RAM

GPUs?

ARM?

Max CPUs (vcpu)

Max RAM

Digital Ocean

$120/month No No 40 256 Google Cloud Platform$100/month

Yes

No

416

11776

Amazon Web Services

$100/month Yes Yes 448 6144 Azure$120/month

Yes

No

120

2400

From the chart above we can see that cloud prices are pretty much the same between cloud providers. For smaller instances (not shown in this table) digital ocean can same some money.