2009/3/31 Marco Roos <[email protected]>:

> I'm not so afraid of the 'delete-all' workflow. The dykes of Holland have a
>>0% chance of flooding, but I feel quite safe ;-)
>
> Would most harm not be limited to the local machine? That may actually plea
> for cloud virtual machines: easy to setup and destroy again.

Yes, one advantage of virtual machines is that you could just throw it
away after running a (I assume lengthy) workflow. The only thing left
then is to limit network access, which should be possible.

Off-topic:

You could even start up your own business selling Taverna workflow
execution as a cloud service - and run that on the cloud!  Assuming
EC2, they charge $0.10/hour - that's about $72/month for one node
being idle.

If you can sell execution of workflows for say.. $0.15/workflowrun,
you'll need to sell about 480 runs a month to stay even. As most
workflows don't run for a full hour, you can lower the price if the
volume goes up. If workflows take longer, you can set the price for
like $0.12/workflowrun as a startup cost, and $0.10 per additional
hour.

If you get more customers - you simply fire up another EC2 node.


(One of the problems with EC2 is that they charge per hour, but you
only get a virtual machine. So even if you can  fire it up on demand -
you have to wait for the virtual machine to start up - and also I
guess you would need at least one node that can take take the response
and do the on-demand startup if needed.

Perhaps another business model would be to provide say cloud Tomcat's
(web containers) - where you put in a .war file and pay a standing
charge that is lower than $0.10/hour, and an execution charge higher
than $0.10/hour.

On the first request to an application, the .war is deployed, the
clock starts ticking, and request is served. After some time-out
(user-specified) the .war is undeployed. If "too many" requests come
in, a second tomcat instance is thrown up and the .war deployed there
as well. If the user has ticked that his .war can't scale to multiple
containers, then the system would redistribute applications between
containers, in worst case one instance per container. If the customer
wants to scale more, he would have to recode his application to
support multiple instances)

-- 
Stian Soiland-Reyes, myGrid team
School of Computer Science
The University of Manchester

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