Using cloud services incurs various costs depending on the resources and services utilized. In the cloud, you typically pay as you go, which must be carefully monitored and ideally optimized. Alternatively, subscriptions or savings plans offer fixed monthly or annual fees for access to a predefined set of resources or services. This funding method provides cost predictability and may offer discounts for long-term commitments.
Regardless of the funding method chosen, it's essential to leverage cost optimization strategies to minimize cloud spending. This includes rightsizing resources, leveraging discounts and reserved instances, implementing automation, and monitoring usage to identify and eliminate inefficiencies. Cost management tools, like Kion, can help estimate budget requirements and even enforce budget controls. Please contact us to discuss strategies to ensure cost-effectiveness for your cloud resources.
Here's an expanded overview of the typical costs associated with the cloud.
Compute: Cloud providers offer a wide range of compute instances which are billed based on usage duration (per hour or per second) and instance type (e.g., general-purpose, compute-optimized, memory-optimized). Costs vary depending on factors such as CPU/GPU, memory, and storage capacity.
Storage: There are various storage options, including file, object, block, and long-term archival storage. Charges are based on storage capacity, data transfers, and retrieval requests.
Networking: Networking costs encompasses various services. Pricing is based on factors like data transfers and network resources provisioned. Data transfer costs apply to data transferred between services within the same region, data transferred between regions, and data transferred out of cloud providers to the Internet or other networks. Pricing varies between cloud providers, but typically charged on the volume of data transferred and the regions involved.
We leverage a data egress waiver in AWS that provides a credit for data egress charges (network data traffic leaving AWS). Please refer to the Internet2 NET+ AWS offering for detailed information.
Database Services: There are multiple managed database services supporting relational and non-relational databases. Data warehousing is also an option. Costs include instance usage, storage, and data transfers.
Additional Services: There is a wide range of additional services, including analytics, machine learning, security, monitoring, and developer tools. Costs for these services vary depending on usage, features, and service tiers.
Funding for cloud resources can be provided through various methods.
ITS Operating Budget: ITS allocates funds from their operating budgets to cover ongoing, essential cloud expenses. These financial resources are necessary to support daily operations, maintain infrastructure, enhance security, optimize performance in a dynamic and rapidly evolving cloud environment.
Your Department's Operating Budget: If departmental funds are available for your cloud projects, please reach out to your budget office to request a purchase order. Please email rcc@odu.edu if you require assistance in estimating your cloud costs.
Grants and Funding Programs: Cloud adoption initiatives in the public sector are increasingly prevalent and play a crucial role in financially supporting cloud research initiatives for the university. These funding opportunities may include government grants, research funding agencies, industry-sponsored programs, or cloud-specific grant programs.
If there are any credits associated with your account, then they are applied at the end of the billing cycle.