[zmmmmm]

you touch on a good point in that because cloud compute requires pretty knowledgeable users in order not to waste massive amounts of money it effectively imposes a much higher level of competency requirement onto the users. You can view that different ways, one is that its a good thing if everyone learns to use compute better. But another is you are locking out a whole tier of scientific users from doing computation at all which is a pretty unfortunate thing - we may miss out on real and important scientific discoveries - even if they are horrifically bad at doing it efficiently.