Anybody tried hosting Omero on a cloud platform?

[tom_deschamps]

Hi

I would be very interested to know if anybody tried to have an omero server hosted on a platform such google/amazon/whatever, and to hear about their experience doing that.
Thanks

Tom

[cxallan]

Hi Tom.

At Glencoe Software we have deployed OMERO on Amazon EC2 on a fairly regular basis for testing and I know others have as well. As a production installation though it is really, really hard to justify the cost if you have local resources available. The EBS and egress bandwidth charges on a pure OMERO install would be pretty significant pretty quickly.

What's your reason for asking?

[tom_deschamps]

Hi

Thank you for your answer. I understand my initial message was not clear enough: We're looking for a solution of hosting omero rather than using local resources, we have limited need for "elastic" capacity provided by EC2 and if that might change, it should stay limited. However we need to be able to do a lot of data transfer.

We currently do not have a dedicated machine for the server and have to share the memory and computing with multiple users and softwares. So we're trying to understand what are the options: acquire local resources including a backup system, or distant reliable resources.

If you think there is another option that makes sense economically, I am all ears.

Thanks

Tom

[cxallan]

As far as cloud resources go EC2 is largely the pricing benchmark. To have a suitable EC2 instance you are likely going to be into several hundred dollars a month. Even if you reserve instances, which is basically a minimum 12 month commitment, your month to month pricing is still fairly significant.

So I guess the basic answer I have to give you is that you can absolutely use the cloud to host an OMERO instance. The real question you probably have to ask yourself is whether you can justify the cost of not running the hardware yourself vs. buying a system to run it locally? Is there a particular reason you wouldn't want to buy your own equipment?

There are of course many additional benefits to running an instance in the cloud but each come with a price tag. Do you have some idea as to what your budget for running an instance is?