I haven't tried Ceph. It didn't seem as appealing, judging from comments I found (mostly on Hacker News): http://www.regressionist.com/2020/06/20/reviews-of-dis

I haven't tried Ceph. It didn't seem as appealing, judging from comments I found (mostly on Hacker News): http://www.regressionist.com/2020/06/20/reviews-of-distributed-filesystems/ http://www.regressionist.com/2020/06/20/reviews-of-distribut... But it's also hard to tell exactly what people are reviewing. Evidently CephFS is less mature than Ceph object store. But, yeah. This just all seems so much cheaper than AWS. There are other advantages, too. Like, a lot of stuff is better with the low latency that comes with having the cluster on-location. Python plots are more pleasant to interact with (ssh -X). NoMachine remote desktop is faster, etc. Also, it's a bit like an all-you-can-eat buffet. You pay once, and then you can just relax and enjoy. I have enough storage now that I don't need to stress about costs before deciding to cache intermediate data. And I don't need to worry about whether I really need those older results that I still have saved on disk that I'm paying each minute to store on AWS. Those kind of thoughts are just gone. I do have one GPU now, a 1080 Ti ($450 on eBay). I am ready to house a total of 6, but I'm waiting to buy more until I really need them.