Specimen 'CTR1L'

Flight Control

Status: Archived
Date: 1 January 2019

Hypothesis

Predicting and capping cloud costs around a traditional-like HPC system build in the cloud with power management features to reduce costs

Overview

Flight Control is a Ruby on Rails application for tracking costs and managing instances on AWS and Azure. It provides visibility into cloud computing costs across projects, enables instance lifecycle management, and helps enforce budget limits through automated recommendations and actions.

Key Features

Cost Tracking

  • Record and view costs for projects hosted on AWS and Azure
  • Dashboard visibility into resource utilisation
  • Historical cost logging and reporting

Instance Management

  • Turn instances on/off via change requests
  • Group-based power operations for managing multiple instances
  • Instance state logging and tracking

Budget Management

  • Budget policies with automated switch-off recommendations
  • Idle node detection with auto-shutdown capabilities
  • CPU monitoring to identify underutilised resources

Integration

  • Slack notifications for alerts and reports
  • Flight SSO integration for authentication
  • Role-based user permissions
  • Scheduled tasks via cron (daily reports, instance logs, cost logs)
  • Background job processing with Resque
  • Comprehensive audit logging

Use Cases

Flight Control helps organisations:

  • Monitor cloud computing costs across multiple projects and platforms
  • Manage compute instance lifecycles to reduce waste
  • Enforce budget limits through automated recommendations
  • Provide visibility into resource utilisation through dashboards
  • Coordinate team access with role-based permissions

This tool addresses the challenge of running cost-effective cloud HPC by providing the management and monitoring capabilities needed to keep costs predictable and controlled.

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