I'm talking about on prem clusters where people aren't using cloud. Many of these are just managed by central IT depts (eg: most of enterprise) . We've found fo

I'm talking about on prem clusters where people aren't using cloud. Many of these are just managed by central IT depts (eg: most of enterprise) . We've found folks are perfectly happy to add gpu nodes to an existing cluster managed by yarn or mesos. The incremental upgrade with just another SKU with an existing hardware vendor purchasing/procurement already works with is usually enough. That being said - it can usually be every 6 months with a renewal of every 2 years or so. Your hardware timelines aren't far off. That being said - I was getting that upgrade cycles don't matter as much. GPU clusters are enough of a new thing for enterprise yet that the jobs being run aren't even that high spec yet. My opinion nothing more not claiming this is fact: Google has marched so far ahead of the rest of the world they aren't really paying attention to where current clusters and usage are. It seems a lot of the cloud usage is oriented towards startups and researchers (which isn't a bad thing, most folks in DL are researchers). For enterprise, they might offload some workloads. There are definitely some workloads where cloud resources (spin up and shut down) make a ton of sense. Cloud servers are overly expensive otherwise.