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The only real advantage cloud has for science is object storage

As someone who has done a fair bit of HPC I consider the real advantage to be temporary scalability. If my 'normal' compute notes have 128 GB of RAM and all of a sudden I have job that need 300 GB or RAM, with cloud I can just change a line in a config file and run that calculation on a machine with 300 GB of RAM. Or if I have a job that will optimally run on 100s of 1-core machines with only 4 GB of RAM I can set up a cluster of such machines with in minutes.

That being said I 100% agree that if you have a normal baseline workload that should absolutely be done on in house hardware.

Those are fair points - I have seen truly spiky workloads like that very occasionally, but more often those spikes are a precursor to more sustained usage in a similar manner and so would quickly warrant hardware purchases.

As an addendum to this: if you absolutely must use cloud, stick with AWS. Using Azure is (IMO) a fucking miserable experience and their only advantage (InfiniBand) is better served by buying your own hardware. GCP and OCI might be fine if you are getting a lot of credits, but the skills will not be useful down the line - while AWS is expensive, you will at least learn a bunch of in-demand operational skills.

So nobody got fired for buying IBM?

I can hang 32 terminals off just one PC. You're still blowing your budget on standalones.

Dang it all, we had 20+ teletypes hanging off a 32Kb PDP-8 (with DECTape for random access storage), "and we liked it!" :-)

> you will at least learn a bunch of in-demand operational skills.

Are you saying we should stick with AWS because most stick with AWS?

My personal experience with GKE/GCP was quite good, except as expected for their support.

> Are you saying we should stick with AWS because most stick with AWS?

Broadly speaking yes - there is a lot of value in having a deeper pool of skilled people to hire from, and there are enough differences between cloud offerings to knock at least a couple of "effective years" of experience off someone who changes provider.

> The only real advantage cloud has for science is object storage, which is genuinely a much better idea than trying to manage your own long-term archival storage.

I work with an academic HPC group, and because researchers generally pay only for the hardware, and maybe some recharge rate for occasional maintenance, the cost per TB per month for 100's of TB and larger systems works out to the same for Glacier Deep (about $1/TB/mo) - except there is no 180 day requirement, no egress fees, and no transfer fees. And disk just keeps getting cheaper.

I'm told that big part of the solution is their use of ZFS.

If you can setup HPC at scale you can setup Ceph for object storage. It will save you so much money in the long run.

I have heard too many horror stories about Ceph (and OpenStack) to be confident about that. I certainly don't think I can truly beat S3 on cost or performance at the terabyte scale for household data - and while larger scale would give on-prem savings there are also higher expectations (in terms of availability and performance) of a multi-perabyte storage array.

Really depends on your scale. At the Terabyte to 100s of TB level, you can solve most storage problems at minimum cost with NAS or ZFS on commodity hardware.

Ceph/Object storage comes into its own at the multi-petabyte and higher levels, which is not very many groups or institutions.

Solving storage at the tens of TB scale with commodity hardware is fine to a point (I have a ZFS NAS at home) but has much more ongoing maintenance burden than S3 and you need at least 2 copies for it to be a remotely comparable solution in terms of durability.

Ultimately you just have to design for what is important to you; I don't want to spend time managing this stuff any more, so keep a local NAS for my partner to access and put the bulk of my "cold" data into 2 different cloud object storage providers. Note that neither of these is actually S3; for business use I would absolutely use AWS but for personal files I can manage with the reduced capabilities and lower prices others offer.

Yep it is quite an arbitrage going on. Unless startup credits at the highest tier ($100K), way too expensive for most startups.

For a lot of our customers, cloud is impossible now for HPC: shortages are so bad that you have to know someone high up at top cloud providers to get access to right-sized GPUs. (T4? Forget it -- one of our tickets is open since ~Christmas.)

We have gone hybrid, and for growing compute, going multi-cloud, with main stuff on top 3 clouds (CPU, light minimal GPU...), and GPUs elasticity on other ones. And for a lot... Yep, just buy GPUs for local dev.

I'm curious what people are spending / over spending all their money on in the cloud?

My exposure to the actual granular costs and billing have only been limited to a small company and in that case the costs were pretty appealing compared to running everything yourself. Granted this was also a bit of a hybrid with some services local and others in the cloud.

I've not had much exposure to where the deep costs start to pile up as far as cloud services goes. I wonder where those pop up?

> I'm curious what people are spending / over spending all their money on in the cloud?

Outbound data.

Cloud companies generally make inbound data close to free, but outbound data incredibly expensive.

> If I were independent I would recommend people buy and build on-prem clusters and shuffle data out of fast scratch into Glacier,

Pretty much 100% agree with this statement. Only exception is maybe at the beginning of a long series of computation, you might want to start on-demand to fully understand and size your exact needs, and then provision off-prem.

Scalability might still be a major advantage if you have infrequent enough needs for HPC-scale compute. Basically, use the cloud service as a pure computational "grid". But the pitfalls of cloud business models (including sky-high costs for data egress) often make that unworkable.