Yes, it is precisely the management and provisioning that is difficult. No one does hourly billing anymore, thankfully. GCE and AWS do per second or per minute

Yes, it is precisely the management and provisioning that is difficult. No one does hourly billing anymore, thankfully. GCE and AWS do per second or per minute... What I do now is autoscale a group of GPU instances in AWS based on the size of the jobs queue. I create as many instances as will reasonably help, sometimes up to 100. Work is distributed to them. They turn off immediately once there is no more work to do. The code runs in Docker containers but I am forced to maintain the base linux system and nvidia drivers b/c no one provides a container or FAAS for nvidia gpu computation... I get the sense that this is a common problem nowadays. The way NVIDIA manages software releases doesn't help anything. There's quite a bit of .. churn. They don't play nice with anybody else hence Linus's famous words. There's totally a market for containers as a service with passthrough access to NVIDIA hardware. It best not be more than 30% more expensive than a raw instance though, or it won't be very exciting.