noogle

But it doesn't save much engineering time. You now need to manage those services, and the high mark-up means you need to invest effort in scaling things up/down.

Yes, it took me about a week to learn to set-up a Postgresql high availability cluster. But now it saves me $4,000 per MONTH for each of our 10 databases.

And if you are using EC2 instances, AWS saves very little effort compared to bare metal.

The problem is the network effect. With GPUs, substantial effort has been done to build products and tools on top of Nvidia's proprietary framework (CUDA). The community invested in a proprietary system under the understanding that Nvidia will supply the hardware and not monopolize this investment.

Should the community have divested from Nvidia's proprietary format and spread its resources on multiple platforms? Concentrating effort can benefit everyone, but it requires trust.

In addition, part of this community investment was funded by government research grants, adding a legal/public policy aspect to the issue. Should taxpayer money be spent on creating private, abusive, monopolies?