Accounting
Accounting principles and quotas
This document describes how resource usage in Pouta is calculated as Billing Units (BUs).
Academic research customers can have their resource use paid for by the Ministry of Education and Culture. For commercial customers and academic customers who require more than what is granted from the ministry's paid-for allocation, CSC has billing unit packages for purchase.
For more information about which category your project falls into, please see Accounts and projects.
Accounting for resources
Currently, we account for virtual machines, volume storage, object storage and floating IPs.
| Resource | Cost |
|---|---|
| Virtual machines | See Flavors |
| Storage volumes | 3,5 BU / TiB hour |
| Floating IPs | 0,2 BU / hour |
Please note that virtual machines consume BUs regardless whether you are using them or not. This means that a shut down or suspended virtual machine still consumes BUs. You can find more information about the different states of virtual machines and their BU consumption in Virtual machine lifecycle. The minimum accounting time for a virtual machine is one hour. Another source for estimating usage is the [Resource calculator]
Storage volumes consume billing units based on their size. The unit of measure is TebiByte hours. Storage volumes consume BUs even if they are not attached to virtual machines.
Objects storage consumes billing units based on the stored data amounts. The billing units are consumed until the data is removed.
Floating IPs are billed if they are allocated to a project or assigned to a virtual machine. Any extra routers you create and connect to the external network will also billed for one floating IP. The default router included in the project does not consume billing units.
Other costs
If you have a contract with CSC, you will always be billed according to the contract even if it differs from these practices. Commercial customers are usually also billed a fee for each member of the project.
Quotas
Each cPouta and ePouta project has a cloud computing quota that limits the use of simultaneous cloud resources. There is a default cPouta project quota which is quite small, but users can apply for extensions by sending email to ServiceDesk.
Default size of the cPouta project quota.
| Resource type | default |
|---|---|
| Instances | 8 |
| Cores | 8 |
| Memory | 32 GB |
| Floating IPs | 2 |
| Storage | 1 TB |
With the default resources, a cPouta user could launch eight standard.tiny instances or two standard.large instances or one hpc-gen1.8core instance. The purpose of the quota is to prevent individual users from reserving the entire cluster and thus preventing other users from accessing it.
Storage is also limited by a quota. The default quota for new projects is 1 TB. Additional allocations can be requested by sending email to ServiceDesk.
The initial quotas for ePouta projects are agreed upon when starting a new project.
Please note that having free quota does not guarantee that specific resources are available.
Specific virtual machine flavors may be full, so you cannot provision them even if you have the quota to do so. We always strive to have free computing resources in some flavors. We are planning to improve the visibility of which flavors are available in the future.
We try to always have free storage and floating IP resources, if quota for them has been allocated.