Migrating a National Cloud Platform for Urban Analytics: A Performance Assessment Framework

The Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN - www.aurin.org.au) is a national platform (in Australia) for research into the urban and built environment that has been funded as part of the National Collaboration Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS). The system provides secure, seamless access to over 5,000 (typically definitive) data sets from over 100 major organisations crossing government, industry and academia. The system has a rich and diverse user community with over 15,000 users and many actively using the systems on a regular basis with periodic spikes in usage, e.g. when large-scale urban and built environment classes are run. AURIN has been running on dedicated hardware running VMware with redundancy/back-up systems running on the OpenStack-based National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (NeCTAR - www.nectar.org.au) Research Cloud. In 2019, AURIN was awarded a further $18.9m for a further 5-years as part of the NCRIS program. As such, there are decisions to be made on the future deployment of AURIN and whether to go fully onto a public Cloud such as NeCTAR or to continue to run on dedicated hardware. This paper explores the technical performance considerations that should underpin such a decision. We identify that even though NeCTAR performs better for most Cloud resources, it is less performant for disk operations which is essential for the majority of AURIN use-cases.