Tracking Cloud Spend
Using Fuzzball in the cloud incurs costs in several ways.
Cloud providers charge for the resources needed to run Fuzzball Orchestrate/Federate. These costs are fairly minimal since a combined Orchestrate and Federate installation only requires 8 CPUs and 32 GBs memory. An AWS Fuzzball Orchestrate installation also requires services such as RDS, EFS, S3, EKS, etc.
The most substantial cost associated with a cloud instance of Fuzzball is incurred by the cloud provider billing for the compute that runs users’ workflows. These costs are more variable and can be substantial depending on the workflow(s). Administrators are advised to carefully consider potential costs when configuring resource definitions and storage classes to avoid unanticipated bills. For reference, see this EC2 pricing guide.
Fuzzball itself is also a paid service. Specifically, usage of the following Fuzzball components is metered per minute.
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Orchestrate: This is the main component of Fuzzball that hosts the API and web interfaces, accepts and parses Fuzzfiles, and orchestrates workflows. It is expected to be a long-running service.
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Substrate: This component runs on compute nodes. It is the container runtime used by Fuzzball. Because Fuzzball spins cloud resources up and down for the duration of jobs within a workflow, you will only be charged for this service while jobs are running.
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Substrate (GPU): There is a special variant of Fuzzball Substrate that runs on resources containing GPUs. This version of substrate is billed at a different rate. Like the CPU-only version of Substrate, the GPU-enabled variant only runs for the duration of a job.
The Fuzzball system installs its own meters that track the usage of each billed service rounded up to the nearest whole minute. These report data to the AWS marketplace hourly. You can view charges for Fuzzball in the AWS console by selecting “Billing and Cost Management”.
Once there, select “Bills” and filter “Charges by service” on the keyword “Fuzzball”.
