This article covers some simple ways to optimise costs by right-sizing machines, choosing appropriate storage and turning machines off. Note, most costs are in $USD.

Select the right size machine for the workload

Each research workload is different. With RONIN You can easily pick the correct machine to suit your needs.

The cheapest machine machine charges around $0.01 per hour (~$7 a month). This will give you a machine with 1 cpu and 0.5GB RAM.

More expensive machines can charge around $30 per hour (~$21,600 a month)! This will give you a machine with 64 cpus, 488GB RAM, and 8 NVIDIA V100 GPUs.

And there are machines and pricing everywhere in between. These configurations are given names like a1.2xlarge that represent the hardware and size of the machine. See here for details: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/

The RONIN interface provides some simple choices from this giant list and groups more bespoke configurations intelligently. Note: not all configurations are available to RONIN in the AWS Sydney region we connect with.

Also the great thing about RONIN is that you can easily change the configuration of your machine during its lifetime. Details on doing this can be found here: https://blog.ronin.cloud/changing-machines-in-ronin/ But in summary, Stop your running machine from the Machine Summary page, then click the edit icon and choose a new configuration:

Open

This means you could run some expensive GPU-enabled analysis on a g3.8xlarge machine then change to a t2.small to complete some simpler, long-running part of your analysis, keeping your data and software configuration the same the whole way through!

This is a useful site for finding something to fit your workload: https://ec2instances.info/

The AWS pricing calculator can help you estimate costs too: https://calculator.aws/#/

If you still have no idea what to select, get in touch with us (sih.info@sydney.edu.au) to help scope your workflow.

Turn off your machine when not using it!

Not running anything on your instance, but plan on using it next week? Just turn it off. This can be done in the Machine Summary page by clicking the square Stop icon on the card. About 1 minute later your machine will be off costing you $0.00 (except for storage charges).

Open

When you want to turn it back on, simply click the Rocket launch icon on the card. Wait for about 30 seconds, then you should be up and running again, ready to connect.

Smart Scheduler and auto-shutdown

Feeling lazy? Make use of the RONIN smart scheduler to automatically turn your machines on and off as needed (e.g. after 5pm, on weekends, etc): https://blog.ronin.cloud/smart-schedule-help/

You can also set up commands in your workflows to automatically shutdown the machines you are working with after your workload completes.

On Linux machines you can use:

On Windows you can use:

Storage costs

Hard drive storage space can be a hidden cost with cloud computing so is a good target to optimise costs for. Unlike machines, you pay for storage all the time. Storage costs the same price whether machines are turned off or on. You are also charged when you move data from the cloud to anywhere else - known as data egress (but it is free the other way around - data ingress). Here are some tips to manage your storage costs.

Storage management

You can add storage when you first create your machine or you can create new storage later through the Drive Storage side bar menu. On this page you will see storage that is currently attached to your machines, storage that is available to attach to a machine, and an option to create a new hard drive.

In this manner you can add storage as you need it. You can choose a relatively small storage space for initial build of your machine, then add additional storage space as requirement grows.

Select the storage type you actually need

There are 4 storage options for attaching to your machine:

SSD - $0.12 per GB per month (~$120 per TB per month). This is the fastest and most costly storage option. Generally the operating system and software will perform best on this type of storage.

Hot HDD - $0.054 per GB per month (~$54 per TB per month). This is usually fine for typical data storage and reading and writing from your software and OS.

Cold HDD - $0.030 per GB per month (~$30 per TB per month). This is best used for data you do not need to access as frequently but still require reading and writing to.

Magnetic HDD - $0.080 per GB per month (~$80 per TB per month). This is generally best for archive purposes, as it is slow for reading and writing.

Data egress or copying data from your machine to local (including Artemis, RDS, your laptop etc) charges are around $0.02 per GB (~$20 per TB).