Cloud Services Frequently Asked Questions

Physical resources reside in secure facilities, with independent auditing practices followed by the cloud vendors. Data are encrypted and host companies do not have access to those encryption keys. You (the account holder) manage access through user identities and access policies.  Security responsibilities are shared between the cloud provider and its customers.

Cost depends on use.

We start with the ‘three cents’ rule of thumb: A modest machine with one CPU will cost you three cents per hour, or $21 per month. Storing one Gigabyte of data for one month costs three cents. We partner with cloud providers to provide discounting, deep-dive consulting, and a set of tutorials to help you get very accurate cost estimates.

Yes.

This is why so many researchers rely on the cloud in this era of Big Data. Individual cloud machines come in many state-of-the-art flavors: GPU-intensive, compute-intensive, memory-intensive, low network latency, general purpose and so on. But there’s also a double-win for intensive science computation in the cloud: You do not have to wait for resources to become available and, if you can parallelize your work, you can spin up large (or very large) clusters to finish your tasks quickly.

Example: 

Suppose you have a highly parallel task that takes 40 hours on 20 nodes with 16 cores each. If you are sharing computing resources with other research groups, you may need to wait 24 hours—or maybe weeks—to use them, so your wall-clock time for one processing run becomes 64 hours or much longer. In the cloud, you can distribute your work among 2,000 machines, start immediately and run your work to completion in 30 minutes. The cloud has many strengths, and scalability is one of the biggest.

Most cloud providers offer a Free Tier of usage, good for one year, which will enable you to explore cloud computing at low financial risk.

Cloud providers often offer additional research computing credits through a managed program available by filling out a one-page application and coordinating your efforts with us. Once you determine whether the cloud works for you, there are various funding agencies that can help pay for your research. 

Yes, absolutely.

Both the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) fund cloud computing. We can help you explore these options.

Yes.

Because HIPAA compliance is such an important topic, we encourage you to consult with us and connect with other research teams in working out implementation details.

Yes.

There are two options:

• You can allocate a virtual machine in the cloud, install your favorite database on it, and operate it as if you were operating a database server that you own.
• You can also simply pay for a database-as-a-service and dispense with worrying about the underlying machine, operating system or installation of a data base management system.

Both options have supporting arguments and we can help you decide which path is best for you.

The #aws_cloudystuff Slack channel on UCSDTech has a lot of campus cloud support members.  #containerization is for discussion of tech such as Docker and Kubernetes.

The service desk will always route cloud questions to the IT Services cloud team.

IT Services will be holding training days and workshops that are coordinated with public cloud vendors and partners.

These are announced in the sysadmin-l email list and the #aws_cloudystuff Slack channel on UCSDTech

No, you are not locked in.

We can show you technologies like Virtual Machines and Docker Containers that can be moved between cloud environments as you see fit. We can also help you with the details of data archival and relocation services. Because cloud-based technology so closely mirrors traditional computing, you will find that the flexibility of computing translates well to the cloud, including the flexibility to pack up and move on when you so desire.