I'm not in a position to recommend or not a particular provider for gpu-equipped servers, simply because I've never had the need for gpus.
My first thought was related to colocation services. From what I understand, a lot of people avoid on-premise/in-house solutions because they don't want to deal with server rooms, redundant power, redundant networks, etc.
So people go to the cloud and pay horrendous prices there.
Why not take a middle path? Build your own custom server with your perferred hardware and put in a colocation
There are several tier-two clouds that offer GPUs but I think they generally fall prey to the many of the same issues you'll find with AWS. There is a new generation of accelerator native clouds e.g. Paperspace (https://paperspace.com) that cater specifically to HPC, AI, etc. workloads. The main differentiators are:
- much larger GPU catalog
- support for new accelerators e.g. Graphcore IPUs
- different pricing structure that address problematic areas for HPC such as egress
However, one of the most important differences is the lack of unrelated web services related components that pose a major distraction/headache to users that don't have a DevOps background (which AWS obviously caters to). AWS can be incredibly complicated. Simple tasks are encumbered by a whole host of unrelated options/capabilities and the learning curve is very steep. A platform that is specifically designed to serve the scientific computing audience can be much more streamlined and user-friendly for this audience.
Lambda A100s - $1.10 / hr
Paperspace A100s - $3.09 / hr
Genesis A100s - no A100s but their 3090 (1/2 the speed of 100) is - $1.30 / hr for half the speed
It would likely frighten me to know how much JBoss and Websphere is still used.
It seems 15 years ago I was asking ?why aren't we running this in vanilla Tomcat?
I know, I know, it's like "Beetlejuice", you say "Integration Integration Integration" and five salesmen appear to sell you something that provides a bad UI in front of configuration files you'll eventually hand-edit anyway.
Plenty of it in big companies but you won't see a new release. The existing 8.5.5 and 9 will be supported through 2030 but customers are being encouraged to migrate their existing WAS apps to Liberty on OpenShift. There are several migration tools that help analyze the code and runtime for the best way to dissect legacy Java.
AFAIK it has always been relatively weak economically - consider that heavy industry used to be a big deal economically, and heavy industry was in the West. But the region did have some high tech industries such as aircraft, optical, electronics. Semiconductors are in that line of tradition.
There also was automotive industry. Audi is originally from Zwickau. There was a BMW factory in Eisenach. Jena was a stronghold for optics and glass industry (luckily still is to a certain degree).
Yep - it's also an exercise to keep my cloud engineering skills up to date - I can take the approach I use on the hobby projects and apply it to production level stuff in my job.
If it's an exercise to keep your cloud engineering skills up to date, perhaps you'd like to manage your own Kubernetes? Then I'm sure it can be much cheaper.
Spending money on hobbies is part of the benefits of working no? If you can afford the essentials I would hope people are spending money on things they enjoy.
