Senior Design Projects
ECS193 A/B Winter & Spring 2019
Public Cloud Market Price Tracker
| ********** | |
| Name | Robert Hodges |
| Affiliation | Altinity, Inc. ( A data warehouse startup ) |
Project's details
| Project title | Public Cloud Market Price Tracker |
| Background | Businesses are rapidly moving applications to the cloud, which has convenient services featuring flexible compute, storage, and networking. But how much do cloud services cost and how can users get the best deal? These are not easy questions to answer in advance. Public clouds have complex pricing models for services like virtual machines that resemble financial markets. The cost of a virtual machine on Amazon Web Services depends on allocated resources like RAM or CPUs as well as whether you pay in advance and for how long a period. Prices also vary across locations and cloud providers. There’s even a so-called spot market that allows you to bid for VMs. |
| Description | Our price tracker project will allow users to fetch historical cloud prices and load them into a data warehouse that can answer common questions about pricing. For example, users should be able to see the cost of particular VM types over time, compare similar VMs across different regions and cloud providers, and test out different payment types. It should be possible to compare price differences when VM characteristics change, such as doubling RAM, switching from rotating disk to SSD, or increasing network bandwidth. |
| Deliverable | You will develop a set of routines that extract pricing information from the major public clouds ( Amazon Web Services, MS Azure, and Google Cloud Platform ) at regular intervals and store them safely in publicly accessible cloud storage. You’ll then create a data warehouse sample application that loads your historical pricing data into ClickHouse, a new data warehouse that runs very efficiently on cheap hardware. Finally, you’ll build displays that let users answer common questions like comparing prices for similar VMs over time and between cloud providers. Extra credit: build a web site so everyone can see the data themselves. |
| Skill set desirable | Decent Python or Javascript, plus some SQL. You can learn the SQL on the job but you'll need good coding chops in Python/Javascript to be successful. Note: Language is up to the team and other choices are possible. |
| Phone number | ********** |
| Client time availability | 30-60 min weekly or more |
| IP requirement | Open source project |
| Attachment | Click here |
| Selected | Yes |
| Team members | N/A |
| TA | Albara |