[SEJeff]

This is certainly a need in HPC environments. Think of natgas / big oil, finance, science (protein folding, genetic synthesis, genome research, etc). The cloud simply makes no sense for a lot of these industries. We're talking 20k physical computers and using MPI for their research jobs kind of scale. The cloud is not a good fit for those types of envs where they're using 100% of their compute 100% of the time if at all possible.

[ethbro]

I would guess the problem with business as usual is that the cost magnitude of doing this means that only companies throwing off serious cash are doing this.

Which has the side effect of their solutions being bespoke, because acceptable cost looks like "Tell me when I need to stop adding zeros to make this happen."

To go another way you either (1) need to be Amazon-scale already (i.e. "there aren't enough zeros to make inefficiency worth our time") or (2) be willing to say no to huge profits out of ideological purity.

The well-funded client / custom trap is real.

[SEJeff]

I work for one of those HPC / financial firms that I alluded to above. The "no well funded client trap" is also real :)