BigBitBus Console Quickstart
Welcome to the B3Console quickstart.
B3Console is a tool to compare different cloud provider service features, performance and costs. We currently collect and curate information for Amazon AWS, Azure Google Cloud GCP, Linode and Alibaba Cloud, primarily for compute services (VMs); we are rapidly expanding our catalog to include other cloud providers and non-compute service types. Additionally, users of B3Console can add service and cost information about their private in-house cloud into B3Console and then compare their private cloud to public clouds.
B3Console does not seek to “connect” into your cloud provider with your cloud credentials and analyze your current deployment. Think of this tool as a “what-if” tool.
What if …
- … we moved from cloud provider X to cloud provider Y?
- … we chose reserved pricing instead of on-demand pricing?
- … we moved an application from our private cloud into a public cloud, or visa-versa?
- … we ran our VMs hotter at 50% peak CPU utilization instead of 30% and saved money with smaller t-shirt sizes?
You can also compare services across different cloud providers, share your findings, download data into a spreadsheet and be better prepared with objective data when making fundamental decisions around your public, private or hybrid cloud strategy.
Ready to get started? You can watch this 11 minute video that gives you a tour of the functionality. Then you can scroll below to review specific features.
Application Walkthrough
- Account Creation and Login
- Stacks
- Creating New Stacks
- Stack Matching using AI
- Stack Optimization
- Service Comparison
- Service List
- Sharing
- Learn more
Lets start with signing into the B3Console.
Account Creation and Login
You can create an account by logging into BigBitBus using your Google, Gsuite or Github account. For this example lets use Google. Click on the “Google Login” button. The same credentials can be used to log into the console subsequently.
Stacks
After you log in you will see a list of your “stacks”. A few demo stacks are automatically created for new users. Stacks describe an IT application’s infrastructure and may employ one or more kinds of cloud services. Identical services (e.g. a specific VM type in a given cloud provider location) are grouped as different “tiers”. There can be one or more identical service types comprising a “tier”. For example, the bigbitbus_sample_bigdata_apache_spark_cluster example has a master node tier with 3 aws-c5.2xlarge VMs and an application server tier comprised of 32 aws-m5.large VMs.
Its important to note that stacks model your infrastructure, they don’t actually stand up any real infrastructure in a cloud provider! So you are free to create, update and experiment with any combination of services.
Clicking on “detail” lets you view the tiers and cost of your stack and its tier components.
Creating New Stacks
You can create your own stack by clicking on “Add stack”. After specifying a name, description (optional) and metadata (optional), start adding tiers; service type and price tables are available to “populate” the forms by clicking the button WITH SERVICES at the top of the form.
Once you have successfully created a stack you can use it to find alternative configurations in other cloud providers.
Each tier in the stack is comprised of a service type. There may be multiple instances of the same service type within a tier. You can also add arbitrary key-value “service attributes” to each tier. For virtual machines, you can optionally add specific attributes to enter data needed for running the optimization workflow. If you don’t specify these then all optimize requests will instead return attribute matching.
| key | Example value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| util | 20 | Percentage of CPU utilization. If this is low for your application then BigBitBus can use this to downsize VMs when trying to optimize your stack. |
| max_util | 80 | Your comfort level of how hot you want to run your CPUs. BigBitBus will use this value in its performance models when it chooses alternatives. |
| memsizemin | 2 | In Gigabytes (GB), the minimum memory size you want your VMs to have, this value is optional |
| memsizemax | 8 | In Gigabytes (GB), the maximum memory size you want your VMs to have, this value is optional |
Stack Matching using AI
You can find analogous service types for each tier of your stack using the “matching-attributes” functionality. In the case of virtual machines we match the number of vCPUs and the memory (RAM). We are currently working on including non-VM service types and they will be matched based on other relavent attributes.
Stack Optimization
BigBitBus has collected performance data 1000s of virtual machine service types (ranging from 1-32 vCPUs) across different cloud providers. You can Use stack optimiztion by telling the system how much CPU and memory is currently utilized by the tier’s services; the system then finds appropriate VMs in the target cloud provider that will satisfy your application stack’s demand. If BigBitBus does not have performance data then it will fall back to match analogous service types based on attributes like the number of vCPUs or memory size.
Service Comparison
You can also compare individual services with each other. After finding the service you wish to compare click on Compare and select a second service. A tabular comparison of the two services is presented.
Service List
BigBitBus maintains over 10,000 service types being offered by different cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP, Digital Ocean and Alibaba cloud currently) across dozens of their data centers. This list is available by clicking on “Services” on the top menu. Filters are provided to narrow down your searches.
There are also advanced options for creating your own “provider” and add service types to it.
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Sharing
Most page views inside the B3Console can be shared publicly via URL links and through LinkedIn and Twitter. A “Share” button is provided at the top right to quickly create publicly accessible “shares” of the view. Shares can be viewed by anyone with the URL and expire after a user-specified period. Note that shares are HTML files with sponsor links to support the service.
Learn more
Visit our website to learn more.