In the book, we have used examples and case studies that provide you experience and training on the leading cloud service providers - Amazon, Google and Microsoft. The costs for using these cloud services for utilizing the book is minimal, in most cases less that $10 per provider for your entire semester during which you may use these services as of Spring 2014.
We provide some guidance as to the providers below, along with their expected costs for usage. We have no relation to these providers, and their prices and usage policies may change without notice. In any case, we will continue to post the latest information on this website.
AWS provides a free usage tier for 1 year. With the free tier you can use most of the AWS services for free upto certain monthly limits. For example, you can run 750 hours of Amazon EC2 Micro instances per month, 750 hours of Amazon RDS Micro DB instances, use 30GB of EBS storage, 5GB of S3 storage, and other AWS services.
Windows Azure provides $200 of credit with the Free Trial valid for 1 month. The credit can be used for any Windows Azure service including, Virtual Machines, Web Sites, Cloud Services, Mobile Services, Storage, SQL Database, Content Delivery Network, HDInsight, Media Services and other Azure services.
There is no free tier option available for Google cloud.
Most examples in the book can be completed with micro and small instance sizes. Below is a pricing comparison of compute instances from AWS, Azure and Google Cloud (applicable post the free tiers):
Micro (t1.micro) - $0.02 per hr
Small (m1.small) - $0.06 per hr
Medium (m1.medium) - $0.12 per hr
Large (m1.large) - $0.24 per hr
Extra-Large (m1.xlarge) - $0.48 per hr
Micro (A0) - $0.02 per hr
Small (A1) - $0.06 per hr
Medium (A2) - $0.12 per hr
Large (A3) - $0.24 per hr
Extra-Large (A4) - $0.48 per hr
Micro (f1-micro) - $0.019 per hr
Small (g1-small) - $0.054 per hr
Medium (n1-standard-2) - $0.207 per hr
Large (n1-standard-4) - $0.415 per hr
Extra-Large (n1-standard-8) - $0.829 per hr
AWS provides educational grants to students (typically $100 coupons to students). Educational grants can be requested at: http://aws.amazon.com/grants/
Chapter-4: Hadoop & MapReduce - Concepts - 4 hrs
Chapter-6: Python Basics - 6 hrs
Chapter-7: Python for Cloud - 30 hrs
Chapter-8: Cloud Application Development in Python - 16 hrs
Chapter-9: Big Data Analytics - 22 hrs
Chapter-10: Multimedia Cloud - 10 hrs
Chapter-11: Cloud Application Benchmarking & Tuning - 6 hrs
Chapter-12: Cloud Security - 6 hrs
Total = 100 hrs
Chapter-4: Hadoop & MapReduce - Concepts - 16 hrs
Chapter-6: Python Basics - 4 hrs
Chapter-7: Python for Cloud - 20 hrs
Chapter-8: Cloud Application Development in Python - 15 hrs
Chapter-9: Big Data Analytics - 18 hrs
Chapter-10: Multimedia Cloud - 4 hrs
Chapter-11: Cloud Application Benchmarking & Tuning - 4 hrs
Chapter-12: Cloud Security - 4 hrs
Total = 85 hrs
Most examples in the book can be completed with micro and small instance sizes. Micro instances are eligible for free tier. Expected costs with AWS < $5
The Azure free tier credits of $200 are valid for 1 month only. Expected costs with Azure < $10
Expected costs with Google Cloud < $10