3 ms·

using on-demand for latency insensitive work, especially when you’re also very cost sensitive, isn’t the right choice. spot instances will get you somewhere in

• Sebb767 4y ago
  But, as the article points out, you are still paying a lot of money for features that you don't need for scientific computing. Also, AWS is notoriously easy to undercut with on-prem hardware, especially if your budget is large and your uptime requirements aren't - you'll save a few hundred thousand a year alone by not having to hire expert engineers for on-call duty and extreme reliability.
• lebovic 4y ago
  Even spot instances on AWS are still over 2x more expensive per month than Hetzner. The cheapest c5a.24xlarge spot instance right now is $1.5546/hr in us-east-1c. That's $1134.86/mo, excluding data transfer costs. If you transfer out 10 TB over the course of a month, that's another $921.60/mo – or now 4x more expensive than Hetzner. Using the estimate from the article, spot instances are still over 8x more expensive than on-prem for scientific computing.
• dekhn 4y ago
  Even more importantly, if you have any reasonable amount of spend on cloud, you can get preferred pricing agreements. As much as I hate to talk to "salespeople", I did manage to cut millions in costs per year with discounts on serving and storage. Personally, when I estimate the total cost of ownership of scientific cloud computing versus on prem (for extremely large-scale science with both significant server, storage, and bandwidth requirements) the cloud ends up winning for a number of reasons. I've seen a lot of academics who disagree but then I find out they use their grad students to manage their clusters.