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I am wondering if you did a cost analysis. Last time I checked a dedicated on-premise HPC was still cheaper than using the cloud. Actually the CPU hours are ch

by timeu 11y ago

I am wondering if you did a cost analysis. Last time I checked a dedicated on-premise HPC was still cheaper than using the cloud. Actually the CPU hours are cheaper in the cloud but data-transfer (bandwith) and storage make it more expensive (might not apply to storage anymore but AFAIK data transfer costs are still an issue). What is your experience ?

i000 11y ago
Of course we did this, but cost is not the only consideration. Frankly, CPU-hours and TB-years are still within 5-10% of the total cost providing sequencing results to the patients. What is really important is that the cloud allows us to determine exactly our cost-per-analysis without paying for excess capacity or maintenance. What matters also is reliability, redundancy, and peak capacity, where the cloud (both Google and the other provider) win hands down.
boulos 11y ago
Just a note, you don't pay for sending data to any provider (ingress) only for pulling data out / serving it (egress). You can put your GCS buckets behind Cloudflare to take advantage of "interconnect" pricing of $.04/GB. Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine.
- timeu 11y ago
  good to know. Thanks for the info !
laurencerowe 11y ago
You can use https://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/ https://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/ to reduce egress costs from AWS down to $0.02/GB.
jsolson 11y ago
As boulos points out ingress is free -- the other question is how much you actually need to egress. Transfer within a GCP region is generally free as well, so unless you really need your giant result set in its raw form, you can potentially just leave it in GCP and do any analysis/summarizing work you might otherwise have done externally within GCP. Taking this to the extreme, you might even fire up a Windows VM so you could run some analysis or reporting tool there (say, Tableau), within GCP and then only need to egress the Dashboard or Report that it generated. You'd still have the raw data, but you would only be paying to store it. Especially if you're only keeping it around for archival purposes you could put it in a Nearline bucket and really minimize your costs. (note: I work on GCE)

by timeu 11y ago

i000 11y ago

Of course we did this, but cost is not the only consideration. Frankly, CPU-hours and TB-years are still within 5-10% of the total cost providing sequencing results to the patients. What is really important is that the cloud allows us to determine exactly our cost-per-analysis without paying for excess capacity or maintenance. What matters also is reliability, redundancy, and peak capacity, where the cloud (both Google and the other provider) win hands down.

boulos 11y ago

Just a note, you don't pay for sending data to any provider (ingress) only for pulling data out / serving it (egress). You can put your GCS buckets behind Cloudflare to take advantage of "interconnect" pricing of $.04/GB. Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine.

timeu 11y ago
good to know. Thanks for the info !

laurencerowe 11y ago

You can use https://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/ https://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/ to reduce egress costs from AWS down to $0.02/GB.

jsolson 11y ago

As boulos points out ingress is free -- the other question is how much you actually need to egress. Transfer within a GCP region is generally free as well, so unless you really need your giant result set in its raw form, you can potentially just leave it in GCP and do any analysis/summarizing work you might otherwise have done externally within GCP. Taking this to the extreme, you might even fire up a Windows VM so you could run some analysis or reporting tool there (say, Tableau), within GCP and then only need to egress the Dashboard or Report that it generated. You'd still have the raw data, but you would only be paying to store it. Especially if you're only keeping it around for archival purposes you could put it in a Nearline bucket and really minimize your costs. (note: I work on GCE)