Nirin Flavors and Charge Rates

Overview

Resource usage on the Nirin cloud is charged in SUs. Resource usage is charged for on a unit per hour basis, with the units as specified in the following table:

The mapping between resource usage and SUs is specified below.

Note: NCI does not currently charge for public IP addresses (floating IPs), however there is are limited number available and we strongly encourage users to minimise the number of public addresses they use.

Compute Resources - Flavours

Flavours define the core resources allocated to an instance - the set of virtual CPUs, memory and local storage which define the size and shape of the instance. These resources are tightly coupled, since a virtual machine cannot exist usefully without a combination of all three - resource usage charges for vCPUs and memory are thus based on the flavour an instance is built with.

Note: When an instance is resized the new flavour will be reflected in the usage charges - after the resize the cost per subsequent hour of usage will be that of the new flavour rather than the old.

Flavours are either public or private - public flavours are available to all projects, private flavours are only available to a project on request. All public flavours give access to our highly available aggregate, private flavours may grant access to additional more specialised aggregates with different service levels.

The charging rate for common Nirin flavours are noted below. For other flavour charge rates please contact the NCI Helpdesk for further information.

Public Flavours

Selected Commonly Used Private Flavours

Charging for private flavours is available on request.

Note: NCI charges for instances in ‘shutdown’ state as shutdown instances still consume resources on the hypervisor. If you do not wish to be charged for shutdown instances, please terminate them. Alternatively instances can be shelved and offloaded - this will effectively snapshot the instance and move it to offline storage, from which it can be recovered later.

Requesting a Non-standard Flavour

Additional non-standard custom flavours are available - please contact the NCI Helpdesk with details about your needs. Where necessary a new flavour will be created.

Non-standard flavours will be private and available at the discretion of the NCI Cloud Team. They are charged using the same model as the standard flavours - when access is granted for a non-standard flavour you will be notified of the charging rate that will apply.

Volume Storage

Volume storage is available in a number of different performance tiers; all volume storage is equally redundant and reliable. Different storage tiers are specified through the volume's type - this must be specified when the volume is created.

Note: The old __DEFAULT__ volume type is obsolete and being retired - existing volumes with this type must be migrated over to one of the Nirin2 volume types. Please contact the NCI Helpdesk for assistance.

Volume storage tiers and the associated charge rate are documented below.

The General tier is available to all projects who request volume storage. Higher tiers may be requested specially - if you have need of them please contact the NCI Helpdesk with details of your use case.