Hi, Dan and Genevieve from burstable.ai here. We created a tool called burst to make on-demand cloud compute easy. This lets developers access powerful machines for CPU- and GPU-intensive tasks, with minimal devops overhead.

Using our burst CLI, you can provision a cloud VM (or restart an existing one), sync your code and data, run the task, re-sync the data back, and have the VM stop automatically once the task is done.

We've also added support for running JupyterLab in the cloud, with automatic timeout so you don't accidentally leave expensive machines running overnight (or worse).

burst is an open-source project with a permissive licensing model. We do intend to build a PaaS business leveraging burst (the so-called "open core" business model). However, we are committed to the development of burst itself as a viable FOSS project. Our vision is to make simple cloud devops as transparent as possible for data scientists, ML / AI researchers and the like. With the support of users and contributors, this vision can extend to other domains such as 3D production, video analytics and more.

One of our beta testers, an Astrophysicist/Data Scientist, put it succinctly: when it comes to devops "I treasure my ignorance". Developers who are not pursuing an IT/devops career should have an easy way to provision compute resources---one that is predictable, and consistent across platforms. burst is our first step toward that vision. We’re excited to share it with you.