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CREATE Cloud Pricing

Free Tier

Attention

The launch of the CREATE Cloud Free Tier is being held until Q4 2023 due to operational bandwidth constraints. Please include Paid Tier costs in your grant applications. If you are working on a project already awarded funding that requires OpenStack please email support@er.kcl.ac.uk to discuss.

All researchers at King's are entitled to a single CREATE Cloud project (n.b. there is no limit on the number of paid tier projects per researcher/group). The free tier comes with these caveats:

  • Should be considered a development space for experimentation
  • Anything important e.g. prominent web sites/applications, research participant facing applications, critical research applications, etc should not be hosted with a free tier project
  • Free tier usage will only be supported on a best effort basis via the forum not via support emails
  • All storage is hard disk backed (slower)
  • Quota applied to all free tier projects:
    • 4 vCPU
    • 8GB memory
    • 40GB disk

Grant funding and deparmental budgets can be used to pay for resource in CREATE Cloud in one of two ways:

  1. Paying for quota in 1 vCPU + 1 GB memory increments. See our grant costing pages for the latest prices.
  2. Purchasing dedicated server hardware which is then deployed as a hypervisor dedicated to your CREATE Cloud project (n.b. this is required for long term GPU access within the Cloud).

Storage

On the whole storage costs will arise in two areas:

  • VM root disks charged per GB for SSD backed volume storage
  • Data storage provided by RDS charged per TB for projects needing > 5TB

For the latest rates please refer to our grant costing pages.

It is also possible to store larger data on OpenStack volumes but we strongly advise against this approach as RDS is easily mountable and provides resilience and nightly offsite backups. If you do think this approach is not a fit for your requirement please do get in touch to discuss via support@er.kcl.ac.uk.