Community Call: What we’re learning about cloud costs for Earth science workflows in our JupyterHub

Beyond “it depends” - learning about cloud costs for science by building reusable open tooling for monitoring and reporting

Cross-posted at openscapes.org/blog, nasa-openscapes.github.io/news

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Openscapes and our partners at NASA, NOAA, and 2i2c have been learning together about monitoring and managing the costs of cloud computing in a JupyterHub. We would like to share some of these lessons with our community.

Date: Tuesday, April 22, 2025
Time: 9:30 - 10:30 am PT (find your local time)
Where: Zoom
Register (free) via Zoom to get the meeting link

Many organizations are using cloud computing for computational analysis and teaching workshops, often using JupyterHubs as the platform for this work. Tracking usage and attributing costs to specific users and workflows can be tricky on these shared hubs, and we have been learning some strategies and tools to help us understand them. The purpose of this Community Call is to share what we’ve learned: tools and processes to explore cloud costs, as well as figures like the basic costs for hosting a hub, cost per user, cost per science workflow, and what it costs to run a workshop in the hub. Through a light interview structure, Andy Teucher (Openscapes), Alex Lewandowski (NASA Alaska Satellite Facility), and Yuvi Panda (2i2c) will share their experiences and what they are building. Participants will leave with new insights and we’ll post a recording after the event.

What would you like to ask them?

Speakers

Andy Teucher is a core Openscapes team member and develops software and cloud infrastructure.

Alex Lewandowski is a Software Engineer at the NASA Alaska Satellite Facility (ASF) data center, University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute.

Yuvi Panda is the technical lead and co-founder of 2i2c.

Resources

• openscapes.cloud for NASA and NOAA Fisheries JupyterHub policies and cost reporting.
• 2i2c helps communities build their own interactive computing hub in the cloud with open infrastructure.
• Grafana for monitoring and visualizing usage data.
• AWS Cost Explorer and API docs for managing cloud costs on AWS.
• jupycost: A work-in-progress R package from Openscapes for querying and summarizing JupyterHub cost and usage statistics.
• sixtyfour: An R package for interfacing with AWS APIs, from the Fred Hutch Cancer Center Data Science Lab
• grafana-dashboards: Grafana Dashboards used in our JupyterHubs. Provides Grafana Dashboards as code – very useful for learning how to query Prometheus metrics.