SKSI/CloudBudgetingNotes

The current Digital Ocean cloud services provided to the SKSI by the OER Foundation currently include three 'droplets' - virtual Linux hosts. One was used for tutorial purposes, and the other two are providing long-term ongoing cloud services.

Demo server
The demo server, demoserver.milll.ws, was used to set up the WordPress demonstration/tutorial and video. It was a USD24/month instance. It has been snapshotted ('frozen') and the live instance removed to reduce costs.

Existing Services
The two servers are
 * 1) https://bbb.milll.ws which is a dedicated BigBlueButton server - it costs USD24/month (with a specification of 4GB RAM/2 AMD vCPUs/80GB NvME local storage
 * 2) mesc.oerfoundation.org (spec: 8GB RAM/4 AMD vCPUs/160GB NvME local storage + 100GB storage volume) which costs USD48/month for the host & weekly bacups + USD10/month for storage volume. It current hosts
 * 3) https://course.milll.ws - the WordPress Multisite for courses
 * 4) https://school.milll.ws - the WordPress Multisite for individual school websites
 * 5) https://forum.milll.ws - the Discourse forum instance
 * 6) https://chat.milll.ws - the Rocket.Chat messaging server instance
 * 7) https://moodle.milll.ws - the Moodle LMS instance
 * 8) https://safe.milll.ws - the Vaultwarden/Bitwarden password manager instance

Monthly Total: USD82/month or USD948/year

MESC Sysadmin 'sandboxes'
A USD24/month instance (or if the cost isn't prohibitive, a USD48/month instance to ensure sufficient capacity is available) would likely be acceptable for as many as 10 simultaneous trainees, and more cohorts of 10 could likely use it, too, if they are not all using it at the same time.

Recommended Budget
Because demands on some of the existing servers are likely to grow as their services are increasingly adopted, it is probably a good idea to allow for some expansion of the hosting budget of the coming budget cycle.

For example, you might need additional disk space for storage-intensive apps, like NextCloud or Mastodon or Mailcow (or even Moodle or Rocket.Chat) when there are quite a few people using them. With Digital Ocean, the cost for storage is USD1.00/month per 10 Gigabytes. We can expand storage as needed - I usually do it in 100GB chunks (USD10/month) as required.

Similarly, if system memory (RAM) or processing turn out to be a bottleneck, it is possible to increase the resources available to a virtual server, too. So a USD24/month instance could be doubled in spec for USD48/month. You might want to budget for a few of those 'doublings' if the uptake of your services is high.

Budget expectation for the first year.


 * Existing services USD84 per month
 * Sandbox server USD24 per month
 * Server doubling (only if use and uptake increases) US$48

Conservative budget allocation: - USD$156 per month.

We do not anticipate the need for additional storage unless MESC decides to deploy Nextcloud, Mastodon, Mailcow or significant uptake in the number of courses in the Moodle cloud instance.

General info
In general, costs are incurred for
 * 1) droplets
 * 2) storage volumes (potentially)
 * 3) backups (DigitalOcean does weekly disk backups as a secondary disaster recovery option)
 * 4) snapshots (templates from which new droplets can be created)
 * 5) floating IPv4 addresses (addresses which can be moved among servers to allow for graceful fail-over of critical systems)

and other commodity services which might be utilised in future if required.