The fundamental reasoning being, why buy when you can rent it for cheap? Even more compelling when the cloud services offered on rent can do so much more than what you can buy.
Recent studies show that the high-performance computing market has reached an inflection point of sorts. The major players in the cloud segment include tech giants like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google. The two reasons for the faster cloud adoption of high-performance computing are pretty related to each other and obvious to industry watchers.
To begin with, most traditional on-premises high-performance computing equipment has aged rather poorly. In keeping with Moore’s law, the earlier configurations drastically fall short with clearly inferior capabilities when compared to the newer high-performance computing capabilities in the public cloud.
Added to this is the fact that it’s much easier (and cheaper) to make use of a public cloud’s high-performance computing service rather than replacing the high-performance computing equipment altogether. No wonder that it’s the cloud providers who are the ones buying most of the sophisticated gear to keep up with the growing demand for cloud services.
Also, even IT shops—those who have resisted the move to the cloud the most—face budget crunches, so much that they just can’t afford the highest-performance gear for on-premises use.
The features that the public cloud platforms provide are way more compelling. With the rise of artificial intelligence, machine learning, server-less and container-based computing, high-performance systems can easily mix up services as needed. The integration of several services is a relatively simple process.
In fact, the reasons that several companies are opting for the cloud, is that it’s not just about infrastructure anymore. It’s all about features on the platform. The attraction of those platform features is that which in turn provides the incentive to grow the infrastructure further. Razors definitely need razor blades and those razors are now in the cloud, not in any specific data-center.
It is very much likely that on-premises high-performance computing will continue to survive, but likely be a niche play. Some organizations might need to retain their workloads on premises in the event of they not being suitable for the cloud. Several high-priority or legacy operations, say mainframe or mission-critical applications, can be difficult and risky to be moved onto the cloud as well.
The primary users of such an option would be high secure facilities, those involved in research or graphics processing and other use cases that businesses require dedicated resources. However, as cloud services adoption increases, a hybrid cloud computing deployment model may emerge as the DE-facto standard that appeals to more companies.
Companies stand to benefit quite a lot from utilizing cloud and colocation because these services from IT Support Manhattan offer savings in time, money and resources. The luxury of having high-performance computing capabilities on a public cloud along with a choice of multiple services on tap is just too compelling. The public cloud is just too cheap and too good to pass up anymore.
