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Amazon Makes It Almost Impossible To Calculate Their "Virtual CPU" Equivalent (informationweek.com)
dkatana writes: AWS started out defining its virtual CPUs as being composed of EC2 compute units, or ECUs, which it defined as an equivalent to a physical Xeon processor. However, a virtual CPU now looks suspiciously variable... A virtual CPU is whatever Amazon wants to offer in an instance series. The user has no firm measure to go by. From the article:
[B]y doing a little math, you could actually compare what you were getting in virtual CPUs in EC2 versus Azure. Also by doing a little math, you knew how to compare one Amazon instance to another based on the ECU count in each virtual CPU. Microsoft didn't look too bad in the comparison.
That is one of the casualties of the nomenclature change.
I have searched for updated information on how a virtual CPU is measured and found nothing comparable to the definition of the 2012 ECU measure. I have questioned Amazon representatives three times between Oct. 27 and Dec. 21, and don't have much of an answer."
Alternative: build your own private cloud
The whole point of doing computing in the cloud is to handle variable demand. I spend 98% of my time writing and debugging code, and only 2% running the final model. But when I run it, I want to do it at scale. On AWS I can rent a dozen K80 GPUs for a few hours a week. There is no way it would make sense to own them, even if I could afford to do that.