I work in HPC for a cloud provider, and fully endorse this move. Anonymously, of course. You can make an economic argument for or against cloud in practically every IT domain, but in HPC the case for on-prem is really compelling; none of the cloud networking/resiliency value-add is relevant to batch workflows, and costs per core-hour are only remotely comparable if you use spot - which is itself a major compromise. T…
As an addendum to this: if you absolutely must use cloud, stick with AWS. Using Azure is (IMO) a fucking miserable experience and their only advantage (InfiniBand) is better served by buying your own hardware. GCP and OCI might be fine if you are getting a lot of credits, but the skills will not be useful down the line - while AWS is expensive, you will at least learn a bunch of in-demand operational skills.
Are you saying we should stick with AWS because most stick with AWS?
My personal experience with GKE/GCP was quite good, except as expected for their support.