Re:Azure and AWS's 'GPU general availability' lies
by jph00 on Monday December 19, 2016 @05:14PM
(#13215459)
That's possible, although my understanding is it's more of a capacity planning issue. Indeed, new users can fire up a bunch of much more experience massively multi-core instances and rack up bigger bills than with the GPU instances.
But whatever the reasoning is, the lack of communication of the issue to customers and support staff, and the pointless marketing of a product that new users can't access, is a recipe for frustration.
Re:Azure and AWS's 'GPU general availability' lies
by Taek on Monday December 19, 2016 @06:00PM
(#13215766)
Funny enough they could solve this problem with cryptocurrency. Small payments are irreversible after about 10 minutes, and 5 digit payments are irreversible after about an hour, at least when Bitcoin is the base.
Re:Azure and AWS's 'GPU general availability' lies
by noahwilde on Tuesday December 20, 2016 @09:18AM
(#13219945)
How does that change the fact that the bills are at the end of the month and you could just not pay it?
Re:Azure and AWS's 'GPU general availability' lies
by Taek on Tuesday December 20, 2016 @05:25PM
(#13224787)
Nah you'd use either micropayments or a pay in advance scheme.
Re:Azure and AWS's 'GPU general availability' lies
by noahwilde on Tuesday December 20, 2016 @07:59PM
(#13225902)
Couldn't you do that without involving cryptocurrency?
Re:Azure and AWS's 'GPU general availability' lies
by thatrascaltiger on Monday December 19, 2016 @05:13PM
(#13215452)
Exactly which cryptocurrency is actually feasible to GPU mine? Bitcoin hasn't been feasible to GPU mine for years.
Re:Azure and AWS's 'GPU general availability' lies
by Taek on Monday December 19, 2016 @05:59PM
(#13215753)
Many of them. Pretty much nothing sha based, and nothing Scrypt based, nothing stake based, but most everything else is fine.
Ethereum, Monero, Zcash, Sia off the top of my head, I am pretty confident there are at least a few dozen others as well.
Re:Azure and AWS's 'GPU general availability' lies
by JorgeGT on Monday December 19, 2016 @05:14PM
(#13215465)
Not feasible if you have to foot the bill. But if you don't...
Even requiring a credit card isn't too helpful because cryptocurrency can be cashed out right away, while credit cards transactions can be reversed.
Also, for new accounts which have not been billed yet there is a lot of uncertainty about whether the account was really registered by the cardholder.
This is a nontrivial fraud problem, and the cloud provider response is a first approximation to a solution. I would expect that as they engineer better fraud signals and risk scoring, they'll eventually be able to offer gpus to new accounts.