Budgeting

  1. Attended Cloud Housing
    Budgeting (and billing) will only affect users of the public part of the LRZ Compute Cloud (running VMs with lrz.* flavors).
    Attended Cloud Housing customers are not affected as long as they do not use public resources.
  2. SuperMUC-Nutzer
    Projekte mit SuperMUC-Berechtigung haben kostenfreien Zugriff auf die Ressourcen der LRZ Compute Cloud.

Starting at April 1st 2024, users of the LRZ Compute Cloud will be charged depending on the resources they use.

2024 Billing Period01.04.2024 - 31.12.2024

Costs that have been generated in 2024 until now will be reset on 01.04.2024.
Until then these costs have only an informative purposes.
LRZ Compute Cloud usage in the first 3 months of 2024 will not be billed.

Important next steps (for master users)

Please note: If you do not set the project's and users' budgets to a value greater 0 all VMs will be automatically shelved on April 1st 2024!

  1. Log into the LRZ Compute Cloud's web interface and go to LRZ > Budgeting
    Note: You must use a personal account to log in. Functional accounts cannot be used to set budgets.
    If you cannot log in you probably need to create an account in your project and assign cloud permissions to this account. You might need to wait a couple of minutes before you can log into the web interface.
  2. Set project budget and user budgets to > 0
    Go to LRZ > Budgeting and set the budget of your project and the budget of the users who should be able to start (or continue running) VMs in the LRZ Compute Cloud to a value greater than 0.
    For more information on budgets see section below.

Please refer to our information page for master users for further information.

Pricing

Costs are based on the flavor that a user chooses when creating a VM. The flavors define the physical resources that a VM uses in the compute cloud.

The flavor prices depend on the user class of the LRZ project. Prices of all flavors can be found on this page in the LRZ Compute Cloud's web interface after logging in. You might not have access to all flavors mentioned on this page. Ask your master user if you need to get access to an additional flavor.

Budgets

To prevent that costs are generated without the explizit approval of a project's master user every master user must set the project's budget as well as the budgets of the users in this project to allow for creating virtual machines.

The budgets' value represent the maximum costs a project (or a single user) are allowed to generate in the billing period. There are 2 different budgets:

Project budget

The project budget defined the maximum costs that this project can generate.

This budget acts as an upper limit: The invoice a project's institution will receive will never exceed the budget set by the master user.

User budget

The user budget defines the maximum costs each user can generate in the billing period.

The sum of all user budgets might be greater than the global project budget. But once the project budget is exceeded all VMs in this project will be automatically shelved independent of the individual user budgets.

If a budget gets exceeded (the accumulated costs of all users in the project exceeds the global project budget) all affected VMs will be automatically shelved to prevent additional costs from being generated:

  • If the project budgets is exceeded all VMs of all projects members will be shelved and no one can create and start VMs until the master user raises project budget.
  • If a user budget is exceeded all VMs of the particular user will be shelved and this user cannot create and start VMs until the master user raises the particular user's budget.

Budgets can only be set by the master user(s).

However, generated costs are visible to normal users (costs for entire project, individual costs) as well as master users (costs for entire project, costs for every user in this project).

More information for master users can be found on this information page.

CLI Client

As an alternative to the webui you can also access the budgeting system via our custom CLI client: https://github.com/LRZ-BADW/lrzcc

Frequently Asked Questions (F.A.Q.)

Please refer to the budgeting section in our F.A.Q. for answers to common questions.