Some issues with building a cluster are, you're locked into the tech you bought, need space, expertise to manage it, cost to run/maintain.
You can potentially recoup some of that investment by selling it later, usually a quickly depreciating asset though.
But, no AWS or AWS premium.
Sure, I could spend a few weeks (months?) compiling and trying some random GNU-certified "alternatives" for Cloud Services but ... just nah ...
> I could spend a few weeks (months?) compiling
why would you compile infra-stuff?! Usually this is nicely packaged...
> random GNU-certified "alternatives" for Cloud Services but
For application software you have to take care of this also with the cloud or are you just using the one precompiled environment they offer? Which cloud services do you need anyway - in our area (MatSci), things are very, very POSIX-centered and that is simple to set up.
That has almost never been my experience with "alternatives" but if you can provide a few links I would like to learn about them.
- ZFS is in Ubuntu now, you can host a nice NFS-server easily. MiniIO is a single Go binary, databases are packaged too.
- Slurm is packaged too! I have to admit this gets hairy if you want to have something like https://github.com/NVIDIA/pyxis but still this is far from arcane "alternative" software but the standard. If you buy Nvidia, it comes with your DGX-server just like its rented out by Amazon...
the main remaining pain point I would see is actually netbooting/autoprovisioning the machines (at least this was annoying with us).
> trying some random GNU-certified "alternatives" for Cloud Services but ... just nah ...
A significant fraction, if not the majority, of those services are in fact hosted versions of open-source projets[1] so there's no need to be snobbish.
[1]: and that's why things like Teraform and Redis are going source-available in recent days, to fight against cloud vendors parasitic behavior
I spend low 6 figures of research money on hardware + staff each year, and this avoids us spending 7 figures on cloud costs + staff.
I should have really mentioned your(our) use case, as smallish department without dedicated access to a cluster or people who can run a real steel cluster.
AWS's one click lustre clustre service (FSx) combined with Batch is a really quick and powerful basic HPC cluster.
Before we got bought out, we had planned for creating a "base load" of real steel machines to process the continuous jobs, and spin up the rest of the cluster as and when demand needed
I think it's a W, so far.