Defined by Wikipedia, cloud computing is "is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet)."
As a class, our plan is to implement an enterprise-level domain onto the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). We have been given a $200 budget by the Computer Science department that will (hopefully) last us until the end of the semester. Our domain will contain many of the core services found in businesses, including mail, web, authentication, and monitoring services.
Amazon has a pre-defined list of machines available to choose from to implement to their cloud for us to use. The way billing works for this is that you're billed for every hour, including a fraction of an hour, your machine is online. So if you're machine is only online for one minute, you will be billed for the entire hour. As we will be working on these throughout the rest of the semester, on a $200 budget, it was a tough choice to decide what we should run, as machines differ in price.
Below is a list of the pricing model for the EC2:
Region:
| Linux/UNIX Usage | Windows Usage | |
|---|---|---|
| Standard On-Demand Instances | ||
| Small (Default) | $0.085 per hour | $0.12 per hour |
| Large | $0.34 per hour | $0.48 per hour |
| Extra Large | $0.68 per hour | $0.96 per hour |
| Micro On-Demand Instances | ||
| Micro | $0.02 per hour | $0.03 per hour |
| Hi-Memory On-Demand Instances | ||
| Extra Large | $0.50 per hour | $0.62 per hour |
| Double Extra Large | $1.00 per hour | $1.24 per hour |
| Quadruple Extra Large | $2.00 per hour | $2.48 per hour |
| Hi-CPU On-Demand Instances | ||
| Medium | $0.17 per hour | $0.29 per hour |
| Extra Large | $0.68 per hour | $1.16 per hour |
| Cluster Compute Instances | ||
| Quadruple Extra Large | $1.60 per hour | $1.98 per hour |
| Cluster GPU Instances | ||
| Quadruple Extra Large | $2.10 per hour | $2.60 per hour |
As you can see, pricing can vary from one machine to the next. Linux/UNIX are typically the cheapest machines, while Windows machines tend to be a lot pricier. As a class, we needed to come up with a plan on what types of machines we would use so we didn't go over our budget before the end of the semester. Many of us voted for the use of Linux machines, as they are cheap to run daily and even monthly.
The class was then divided into teams, based on what people wanted to work with from the above services. Many people were interested in mail and authentication, but I chose to stand out and go with monitoring services. My group and I decided that we are going to be using a free open-source monitoring service called Icinga. Forked from the popular free monitoring service, Nagios, Icinga is an "enterprise grade open source monitoring system which keeps watch over networks and any conceivable network resource, notifies the user of errors and recoveries and generates performance data for reporting."
I am very excited to complete this project, as it is a grateful experience to be able to learn this new technology at a young(er) age and come out of college and be able to say, "I have experience with cloud computing." I will try to keep this updated as much as possible with my experience.
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