“That means it’s over 10x more expensive to use AWS on-demand instances than your own infrastructure, and still 5x more expensive to use AWS reserved instances.”
Scientific jobs sit in queues for months and don’t care about a day of downtime. AWS charges you for five nines anyway. Then egress runs over 30x the underlying cost, so moving 90 TB of DNA sequencing data out costs more than $8,000. The cloud’s pricing is built to trap successful web apps. Scientists just get caught in the same net.