61–70 of 215 posts
Still not clear why a university research lab would keep this running 'for a few more days' and not pull the plug immediately until either having the costs under control or some sort of reasonal matching benefit in place.
Not blaming them, but still a nice example to illustrate the myth that 'the cloud' will let you operate without a sysadmin (someone that knows about setting up and managing infrastructure). Yes, there might not be servers you have to rack and electrical power to be provisioned, but the amount and granularity of the parameters and decisions on the virtual fabric to be decided on and continuously monitored for changes…
Not blaming them, but still a nice example to illustrate the myth that 'the cloud' will let you operate without a sysadmin (someone that knows about setting up and managing infrastructure). Yes, there might not be servers you have to rack and electrical power to be provisioned, but the amount and granularity of the parameters and decisions on the virtual fabric to be decided on and continuously monitored for changes…
The non cloud version is your website goes offline for a day due to high traffic. Depending on the website that may or may not be preferable to variable costs.
Wait, wait, this is a university developing something, that needs to be downloaded, they choose a commercial solution for that, and that costs them $10k per day? They don't have their own file-hosting solutions? At a university with an AI dept? With that money ("for a couple of days"), you could buy your own server and do it yourself, for a fraction of the price. And don't tell me you can't find people who'd be capab…
You can't just "buy servers for the same price". Where are you going to put them? How are you going to power them? How is the bandwidth for them provisioned? At some scale these are non-trivial questions - you can't just buy a rack, stick it next to your desk and plug into an extension cord.
The system deployment is something you need to spend time on as well. Bare metal provisioning and deployment of GPU libraries to make things run smoothly takes time.
And finally when the hype dies down in a week or two, what are you going to do with that infrastructure?
Cloud services are not trivial either. But they do have some advantages.
I remarked how impressed I was with the state of technology that made it possible to freely spin up a VM with ~14GB of memory and beefy compute. Now it all made sense--of course someone had to pay for this all. Doh!
Still not clear why a university research lab would keep this running 'for a few more days' and not pull the plug immediately until either having the costs under control or some sort of reasonal matching benefit in place.
Probably because they have to spend their grant money some way.
My Dad told me how back in the 1970s he worked at a government-funded research lab. One time they called up a laboratory glassware supplier and said "We'd like to order $10,000 worth of glassware". The supplier asked "Sure, what specifically would you like to order?" The lab replied "We don't care, whatever you have in stock, so long as it costs us $10,000 and we pay you today – if we don't spend the money today we lose it forever".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The non cloud version is your website goes offline for a day due to high traffic. Depending on the website that may or may not be preferable to variable costs.
This isn't 2005. It really doesn't need to happen anymore.