For fast-moving researchers who are blocked by a queue, cloud computing still makes sense. I guess I wasn't clear enough in the last section about how I still use AWS for startup-scale computational biology. My scientific computing startup (trytoolchest.com) is 100% built on top of AWS.

Most scientific computing still happens on supercomputers in slower moving academic or big co settings. That's the group for whom cloud computing – or at least running everything on the cloud – doesn't make sense.