Hello,
I am a casual user of AnVIL and mainly use it for education through the interactive RStudio environments. I noticed today that the default persistent disk option switched from the hard disk ($2/month) to the SSD option ($8.50/month). I understand that AnVIL’s main demographic users are researchers, and perhaps they are running more extreme analyses in RStudio than I can imagine, but having the default option be the most demanding and highest cost is not very user friendly, especially when I am trying to manage educators and students (!) who are not familiar with AnVIL or are necessarily paying close attention to these things.
I’ll note that for our use case we do instruct students to close their environments and delete their PD at the end of every session, but among nearly 400 students some proportion of them are going to forget, and our shoestring budgets do not have a lot of room for mistakes that could increase our PD cost by 4.25x. We do also check manually what cloud environments are open, but these little things can add up fast!
Was this an intentional choice and if so, I submit my small voice to be taken into consideration to reversing it. If the AnVIL user-base is truly requesting the SSD as the default option I understand, but if not, it would be great to change this back.
Thank you,
Sayumi