Tomas Lazauskas and Iain Stenson: RC Tab
Channel: Society of Research Software Engineering
Date: 2023-02-23

A talk from the Cloud parallel session at RSECon2022.

Full title: RC Tab: Microsoft Azure subscription management, reporting, and usage monitoring software framework

Details: https://virtual.oxfordabstracts.com/#/event/3101/submission/24
Slides: https://d3ijlhudpq9yjw.cloudfront.net/27e123de-6e89-4f9b-b8dc-95274456f139.pptx

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Abstract: Microsoft Azure has been the principal computing platform at the Turing since 2016, highly valued amongst researchers for its flexibility and low barrier-to-entry. However, Azure doesn’t provide a flexible multi-subscription management system that would allow setting automatic hard budgetary limits on subscriptions (accounts) that are paid via the pay-as-you-go or prepayment (monetary commitments) models. For example, it is not straightforward to set expiry dates or budget limits that would automatically turn subscriptions off when one of the criteria is met. 

The Turing uses a multi-subscription model on Azure where we typically dedicate one subscription per project. This results in having more than a hundred subscriptions active at any given moment in time. Without being able to set automatic budgetary limits on subscriptions we would have to dedicate most of the Research Computing team's capacity for manual monitoring and management of subscriptions and limit which services researchers are able to use.

To address this challenge we have developed RC Tab, a software framework designed to support Azure subscription management, reporting, and usage monitoring. RC Tab comprises of multiple modules, such as a web frontend, command-line interface, and email notifications. It is open-source, configurable, quick to deploy, and has been in active use at the Turing for several months.

In this presentation, we would like to share our group’s experience of managing cloud computing resources at The Turing, as well as advertise and share RC Tab with other organisations that are using, or planning to use, Azure.

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0:00 Chair introduction
0:35 Talk
17:07 Q&A