Tag: open source

Calculating net cost of AWS Lambda Functions

With the increased adoption of serverless computing, so is the need to optimise cloud functions, to make use of resources as efficiently as possible, and to lower the overall costs in the end. At the Service Prototyping Lab at Zurich University of Applied Sciences, we investigate how cloud application and platform providers can achieve a fairer billing model which comes closer to actual utility computing where you pay only for what you really use. We demonstrate our recent findings with AWS Lambda function pricing.

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Cyclops 3.2.0 released!

The latest update to the open source Cyclops Framework, part of our ongoing work to advance metering and monetization across cloud platforms, brings yet more new features and improvements:

  • Small fixes to the versioning/rollback features
  • New estimation and forecasting engine

The new forecasting engine is now built into Cyclops’ UDR service and can generate individual or global usage forecasts and cost/revenue estimates based on the existing usage data and be used to evaluate new pricing models.

A full-featured CLI client for the forecasting engine was also created to make using the new functionality more intuitive.

Here is a peek at the forecasting in action:

Generation of an activity pattern-based charge forecast with the forecasting CLI
Generation of an activity pattern-based charge forecast with the forecasting CLI

Diving into the Helm ecosystems: From charts to metrics

In recent months, we have extensively studied Helm charts, including setting up a continuous quality assessment, to find out more about this promising packaging format for Kubernetes applications. Apart from individual tweets and occasional talks, there was a lack of a coherent presentation of the ongoing work. Yet, due to the increasing installation base of Kubernetes stacks, the significance of this work appears to be on the rise. This blog post therefore tells what we achieved already and what we are still going to do in the next months.

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