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And why do people only know Hetzner, OVH and Linode as alternatives to the big cloud providers?
There are so many good and inexpensive server hosting providers, some with decades of experience.
using on-demand for latency insensitive work, especially when you’re also very cost sensitive, isn’t the right choice. spot instances will get you somewhere in the realm of the hetzner/on-prem numbers.
Personally, when I estimate the total cost of ownership of scientific cloud computing versus on prem (for extremely large-scale science with both significant server, storage, and bandwidth requirements) the cloud ends up winning for a number of reasons. I've seen a lot of academics who disagree but then I find out they use their grad students to manage their clusters.
Sure? I mean, if you have: 1) A large enough queue of tasks 2) Users/donstream willing to wait using your own infrastructure always wins (alsuming free labor) since you can load your own infrastructure to ~95% pretty much 24/7 which is unbeatable.
Otherwise completely agree, there might be some cases where the cost of labour means that you're better off running something in AWS, even if that requires someone to do the configuration as well.
Where cloud/aws doesn’t make sense is storage, especially if you need egress, and if you actually need IB
A lot of scientific computing isn't happening continuously, and a lot of it is one time experiment or maybe couple of times after which you would have to tear down and reassign.
Another fun fact people forget is our ability to predict future is still pretty poor. Not only that, we are biased towards thinking we can predict it when in fact this is complete bullshit.
You have to buy and set up infrastructure before you can use it and then you have to be ready to use it. What if you are not ready? What if you will not need as much resources? What if you stop needing it earlier than you thought? When you borrow it from AWS you have flexibility to start using it when you are ready and drop it immediately when you no longer need it. Which has value on its own.
At the company I work for we found out and basically banned signing long term contracts for discounts. We found that, on average, we pay many times more for unused services than whatever we gained through discounts. Also when you pay for the resources there is incentive to improve efficiency. When you have basically prepaid for everything that incentive is very small and is basically limited to making sure you have to stay within limits.
This is sort of a confusing article because it assumes the premise of "you have a fixed hardware profile" and then argues within that context ("Most scientific computing runs on queues. These queues can be months long for the biggest supercomputers".) Of course if you're getting 100% utilization then you'll find better raw pricing (and this article conveniently leaves out staffing costs), but this model misses one of…
Most scientific computing still happens on supercomputers in slower moving academic or big co settings. That's the group for whom cloud computing – or at least running everything on the cloud – doesn't make sense.
The author is making a brilliant argument for getting a secondhand workstation and shoving under their desk.
If you are doing multi machine batch style processing, then you won't be using ondemand, you'd use the spot pricing. The missing argument in that part is storage costs. Managing a high speed, highly available synchronous file system that can do a sustained 50gb/sec is hard bloody work (no S3 isnt a good fit, too much management overhead)
Don't get me wrong AWS _is_ expensive if you are using a machine for more than a month or two.
however if you are doing highly parallel stuff, Batch and lustre on demand is pretty ace.
If you are doing a multi-year project, then real steel is where its at. Assuming you have factored in hosting, storage and admin costs.
Its much more complex than described. The author is making a brilliant argument for getting a secondhand workstation and shoving under their desk. If you are doing multi machine batch style processing, then you won't be using ondemand, you'd use the spot pricing. The missing argument in that part is storage costs. Managing a high speed, highly available synchronous file system that can do a sustained 50gb/sec is hard…
Actually, you are right. Consumer SSDs I've seen only do about 1.5GB/s sustained.
This rings true for me. I have a federal grant that prohibits me from using its funds for capital acquisitions: i.e. servers. But I can spend it on AWS at massive cost for minimal added utility for my use case. Even though it would be a far better use of taxpayer funds to buy the servers, I have to rent them instead.