Cost estimate
Cost estimate
For the future owner of the E-Compass Data Mining Services it is essential to be aware of the operational as well as the migration cost. As the migration of the services to a new data center essentially requires the deployment of a couple of virtual machines images which are available in the OVA (open virtualization archive) format and only minor adjustments by editing the service location URIs and running the available service configuation scripts the migrational cost can be neglected in comparison to the operational cost - as well in terms of finances as in terms of the time required. The complete migration of the services should be done within one or two days.
This leaves the us with the estimation of the operational cost. In order to estimate this we need the following:
Virtual Machine Specification for all service modules
- provision cost in data center (the cost estimate should include energy consumption and hardware maintenance, redundancy and backup as needed)
- by checking all inclusive public cloud offerings we can get a fairly good estimate of the provision cost, given that we know the requirements in terms of CPUs/Cores, RAM, Storage, Network capacities needed.
Limitations In order to get the dimension of a productive environment correctly - and therefore also the cost estimate - we need to derive the limitations of the current implementation of the different services. This includes the knowledge on all parameters that have influence on the scaling of the different services modules. These include:
- current load on VM
- number of E-Shop users
- number of products monitored for each user
This information the allows to derive
- scaling limits for these VM specifications
- VM cost depending on the parameters relevant for scaling
- general provision cost per user, per product or other parameters like e.g. the number of rules defined for the notification & actions engine
Maintenance efforts for each service module
- estimate of the overall effort to maintain the system
- staff required for service maintenance
Helpdesk / user support costs
- Experience from user testing: how much effort is needed to get the services set up for each E-Shop?
