mhm... having skimmed through the article, the only reason (imho) is not wanting to wait for hpc/slurm to schedule your jobs... all the other stuff, could have

mhm... having skimmed through the article, the only reason (imho) is not wanting to wait for hpc/slurm to schedule your jobs... all the other stuff, could have been done with university resources. They usually offer some shared drive space and are often forthcoming in supporting special needs (at least from my experience). Having used both AWS Spot Instances for compute jobs, as well as hpc resources (slurm), the amount of work to getting it run is comparable... Except that the aws stuff quickly gets expensive when needing thousands of cpu hours per "experiment", and money is usually tight at universities ;-). Some ansible scripts automate basically everything away for myself. But using the tool you know is probably not always a bad idea.