Throwaway here. I work for a startup which runs compute-bound scientific simulations. We are considering migrating from our single self-managed HPC, to AWS EC2.

Throwaway here. I work for a startup which runs compute-bound scientific simulations. We are considering migrating from our single self-managed HPC, to AWS EC2. We anticipate using the largest standard instances, with highly spikey usage: frequently none, at times up to 10 concurrent instances, perhaps more later. AWS seems ideal to me because it would let us easily scale up and down as our usage varies. But some of the anti-AWS sentiment in this article has given me pause. Any reason not to do this? Any alternatives I've missed? Our storage and transfer usage will be negligible; it's all compute.