Tony Wildish, EMBL-EBI

Migration to the cloud doesn’t always happen in a single step. Many proof-of-concept or pilot projects find themselves with an allocation which is bounded either in time or money, which they wish to use productively and efficiently.

Longer-running production deployments may not be time-bounded, but will still have a cost-envelope which they must respect, so face essentially the same problem.

Simply running until the time or money runs out can be inefficient, e.g. long-running processes which are killed before completion, or data which is not repatriated to permanent storage in time, all represent lost productivity. If the budget is not a hard limit then failure to respect it can also incur additional costs.

This talk discusses the challenges facing projects at EBI (and elsewhere) in migrating to the cloud, especially commercial clouds such as GCP, AWS, MSA, in the face of such fixed budget constraints, and considers the tools and techniques necessary to provide a robust solution to the problem