Estimate Azure costs#

Warning

Technical support for Turing TREs represents a fixed cost across all projects. Currently, these costs are subsidised by the Turing, but this may change in future.

Azure infrastructure#

The basic infrastructure of our TRE contains the following:

  • Remote desktop gateway

  • Networking and routing components

  • Secure file storage

  • Gitea server for version control

  • HedgeDoc server for collaborative document writing

The cost of this infrastructure is around £1,100 per month. On top of this, you will also need some virtual machines to analyse the secure data which will cost £250 per month or more.

We have guidance on how to estimate Azure costs, which includes some recommended setups for common project scenarios:

Cost examples#

Some example projects with associated costings are included below. You may want to use one of these as a template for your own project costing.

Note

Our recommended setup is to use one Standard_D8s_v5 virtual machine (8 CPUs and 32 GB RAM). There is a list of available virtual machine sizes and costs here.

Please get in touch with us if you have any questions.

Small project#

For a project with no special requirements and a small project team, the following should be sufficient.

Item

Cost (£ / month)

SRE infrastructure

1100

Standard_D8s_v5 VM

250

Total

1350

Project needing a database#

For a project requiring a PostgreSQL or SQL database, the following should be factored in.

Item

Cost (£ / month)

SRE infrastructure

1100

Standard_D8s_v5 VM

250

PostgreSQL or SQL database

50

Total

1400

Note database costs can vary.

Project needing more processing power#

For a project that needs to do a lot of parallel or batch processing, the standard virtual machine will be too small. See here to read more about compute-optimised virtual machine sizes. Using, for example, a Standard_F16s (16 CPUs and 32 GB RAM) will give the following costs:

Item

Cost (£ / month)

SRE infrastructure

1100

Standard_F16s VM

530

Total

1040

Project needing more memory#

For a project that needs to do in-memory caching or manage large datasets in memory, the standard virtual machine will be too small. See here to read more about memory-optimised virtual machine sizes. Using, for example, a Standard_E8s_v5 (8 CPUs and 64 GB RAM) will give the following costs:

Item

Cost (£ / month)

SRE infrastructure

1100

Standard_E8s VM

350

Total

1450

Project needing a GPU#

For a project that wants to do computer vision or deep learning, a GPU might be needed. See here to read more about GPU-optimised virtual machine sizes. Using, for example, a Standard_NC8as_T4_v3 (8 CPUs, 1 GPU and 56 GB RAM) will give the following costs:

Item

Cost (£ / month)

SRE infrastructure

1100

Standard_NC8as VM

520

Total

1620

Project with many participants#

For a project with many participants it may be convenient to deploy several different virtual machines. For example, a project with ten people that wants to share each virtual machine between two people would have the following costs:

Item

Cost (£ / month)

SRE infrastructure

1100

Standard_D8s_v5 VM

250

Standard_D8s_v5 VM

250

Standard_D8s_v5 VM

250

Standard_D8s_v5 VM

250

Standard_D8s_v5 VM

250

Total

2350

Project needing lots of data storage#

For a project that deals with large datasets, the standard 1 TB of data storage might be insufficient. Using, for example, 10 TB of storage instead will have the following costs (using a typical cost of £148 per month for each TB of storage - based on Azure Storage Pricing Calculators).

Item

Cost (£ / month)

SRE infrastructure

1100

Additional 9 TB of storage

1330

Total

2430