Estimate cost of running a bridge in the cloud

Karsten and I talked about estimating the cost for running a bridge in the Amazon cloud. By estimating the cost of running a bridge in the cloud, we can come up with reasonable defaults for bandwidth limits etc.

Karsten did a quick analysis of the bandwidth consumed by bridges in June 2011 (see the attached pdf).

The first graph shows the total read and written GiB per month, focusing on the 10% of bridges with highest bandwidth consumption. Consider this graph the worst-case scenario from an operator's POV. The graph says, for example, that 1% of bridges read and wrote more than 100 GiB per month and that no bridge read and wrote more than 1 TiB.

The second graph looks at per-second bandwidth in KiB. In contrast to the first graph, the second graph only looks at intervals when the bridge was online. This graph says, for example, that the top 1% of bridges read and wrote more than 25 KiB per second and that no bridge read and wrote more than 225 KiB per second.

added component::archived/tor cloud owner::runa priority::medium resolution::fixed status::closed type::task labels

Trac:
bridge-bandwidth.pdf

Trac:
bridge-bandwidth2.pdf

We decided to set up a bridge in the Amazon cloud, run it for 1 week and allow it to use a maximum of 100 GB both in and out. I decided to put my EC2 instance in US East (Virginia), simply because this is the cheapest option.

I couldn't find official Debian images, so I decided to go with Ubuntu. Official Ubuntu AMIs are published by the 'Canonical' user, with Amazon ID '099720109477'. I chose the image with AMI ID "ami-02ef2b6b", which is Lucid Lynx, 32 bit, server.

The bridge is now up and running. We'll see how it goes.

Trac:
Status: new to accepted

I realized that I could use the micro instance, rather than the small server instance. I'm setting up a micro instance now, so the bridge will run until Friday next week.

Current estimated unpaid balance to be charged for this billing cycle (for activity from approximately 07/22/2011 08:29 GMT, through approximately 07/30/2011 10:59 GMT) is $7.52. This includes, in addition to taxes, the following:

• $0.02 per Micro Instance per hour (or partial hour): 191 hours used equals $3.82
• $0.10 per GB-month of storage: 2.505 GB-Mo used equals $0.25
• $0.10 per 1 million I/O requests: 92,027 IOs processed equals $0.01
• $0.01 per 10,000 gets (when loading a snapshot): 795 Requests processed equals $0.01
• $0.01 per 1,000 PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests: 78 Requests processed equals $0.01
• $0.120 per GB - up to 10 TB / month data transfer out: 10.464 GB out equals $1.26
• $0.010 per GB in/out/between EC2 AZs or using IPs or ELB: 0.461 GB used equals $0.01

If I were to run the bridge for a whole month, and we can assume that the number of IO requests processed and the amount of data transferred stay roughly the same, I would be looking at paying around $30 in total.

If I am reading the extra-info descriptors correctly, my bridge has been used by clients in countries such as cn, br, de, fr, gb, ir, sg and th. I believe Karsten will update this ticket with more info.

In past i had a similar need and i compared Amazon vs RackSpace.

I found that Rackspace, for something that must be "always on" could cost less than Amazon.

That's not a spam eh, it's just that i would suggest you to have a look at: http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/servers/pricing/

256MB RAM - 10GB Disk - $0.015/hr. ($10.95/mo.)*

The cost of bandwidth is: Outgoing $0.18 Ingoing $0.08

Replying to naif:

I found that Rackspace, for something that must be "always on" could cost less than Amazon.

Thanks for reporting this. I know that using Rackspace is cheaper for something that must be "always on". However, Rackspace does not allow users to upload and/or use custom images.

As part of estimating the cost of running a Tor bridge in the Amazon cloud, we are also creating bridge-by-default images for Amazon. The idea is that users can sign up on Amazon, click a few buttons and run a Tor bridge within a couple of minutes.

I looked up the fingerprint hash in the sanitized bridge descriptor tarball that's available on the data page. I extracted only the descriptors published by her bridge and attached them in a tarball to this ticket.

I looked at the bridge's bandwidth histories and learned that the bridge wrote 10.48 GiB and read 10.33 GiB between July 22 and July 30.

I also looked at the number of users by country. Here's a very rough estimate for the total number of users that the bridge has seen over the week:

cn=88
de=16
ir=16
sg=16
gb=12
au=8
es=8
ca=8
th=8
fr=8
tn=4
br=4

Trac:
task-3574-descriptors.tar

The September 2011 milestone page says this task is done. What's the result?

Trac:
Type: defect to task

Replying to karsten:

The September 2011 milestone page says this task is done. What's the result?

Well, we wanted to know how much it would cost to run a useful bridge in the Amazon cloud. The answer is; about $30 if you write/read 10GB a week. Did you want to see more numbers?

Ah, $30/month is a fine result. Of course, if you have more numbers that may be interesting here, do tell.

I was asking, because the wiki page said this task was done, but the ticket was still open.

At some point in September we'll want to have a sentence or paragraph saying what was the result of estimating average/maximum cost of running a bridge in the cloud. Having this sentence or paragraph at the end of this ticket and closing it afterwards would be very convenient. Thanks! :)

Replying to karsten:

Ah, $30/month is a fine result. Of course, if you have more numbers that may be interesting here, do tell.

I was asking, because the wiki page said this task was done, but the ticket was still open.

Ah :)

At some point in September we'll want to have a sentence or paragraph saying what was the result of estimating average/maximum cost of running a bridge in the cloud. Having this sentence or paragraph at the end of this ticket and closing it afterwards would be very convenient. Thanks! :)

I believe SiNA is running a similar experiment, so I'll wait with closing this ticket until I have the results from him.

Replying to runa:

Replying to karsten:

At some point in September we'll want to have a sentence or paragraph saying what was the result of estimating average/maximum cost of running a bridge in the cloud. Having this sentence or paragraph at the end of this ticket and closing it afterwards would be very convenient. Thanks! :)

I believe SiNA is running a similar experiment, so I'll wait with closing this ticket until I have the results from him.

Seems like his bridge fell into the private pool, so nothing useful to report here.

Trac:
Resolution: N/A to fixed
Status: accepted to closed

Some other cloud providers which allow you to use a custom image some even have a free trial: ElasticHosts (UK/US), Serverlove (UK), FlexiScale (UK), CloudSigma (CH) and SkaliCloud (MY)

closed

mentioned in issue #4387 (moved)