In August of 2016, we had some discussions on IRC about the value of HCoop getting out of the hardware business and running our services on virtual machines from an infrastructure-as-a-service provider. JackHill offered to evaluate options from a cost perspective, and this page is a place to gather those considerations. There are, or course, other considerations in addition to cost, and those belong here too.

== Cost ==

=== Current Needs ===

Our current needs based on the [[Hardware]] page:

 * '''Storage''': 2TiB. In AFS we are currently using 44% of 870GiB available space. 2TiB will give us enough space to accommodate our current storage needs with enough headroom to grow, local storage on machines, and working space for backups.

 * '''Servers'''
   * '''Web''': 6GiB RAM, 6 CPU
   * '''Login''': 3GiB RAM, 4 CPU
   * '''Mail''': 2GiB RAM, 4 CPU
   * '''Infra''' ''(AFS, KRB5)'': 4GiB, 2 CPU
   * '''Misc''': 2GiB, 2 CPU
 * '''Network''': current usage unknown

Our current cost per month at Peer1 is $680.

=== auro.io ===

[[https://auro.io/|Auro]] is a Canadian OpenStack provider

 * '''Servers'''
  * 1 x 2 GiB, 2 CPU
  * 2 x 4 GiB, 2 CPU
  * 1 x 4 GiB, 4 CPU
  * 1 x 8 GiB, 4 CPU

 * '''Storage'''
  * 2TiB in addition to what is included with servers

 * '''Network''' is currently free.

The above would come to $514/month

=== Linode ===

 * afs+kerberos master with block device (12G, $80)
   * will also include databases (7.2G, light usage, not financially
     sensible to split out)
 * tiny secondary afs volserver/kerberos  (1G, $5)
 * member shell server (8G, $40)
 * web server (8G, $40)
 * mail server (4G, $20)

block storage is $.10/G per month, we are using ~400G including dead
volumes now so could start with 600G to avoid downtime for resizing
volumes (or annoyance of vicepa, vicepb...)

80 + 5 + 40 + 40 + 20 + 60 + 10 = $255

outpost is $10 per month, could downgrade to $5 per month as well

New block storage volumes aren't available on the east coast right now, only in CA on hard drives. (The service is still in beta) Could put the AFS server on a larger instance, e.g. Linode 48 (0.75 TB) for $180 more, or use multiple file server instances

=== Other VPS providers? ===

 * [[https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/|DigitalOcean]]
 * [[https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/|Amazon EC2]]
 * [[https://cloud.google.com/pricing/|Google Cloud Platform]]
 * [[https://www.ibm.com/cloud/pricing|IBM Cloud]]
 * [[https://ovhcloud.com/products/public-cloud/public-cloud-compute-instances|OVH]]
 * [[https://www.hetzner.com/|Hetzner]]