
Ask HN: AWS vs. AZURE vs. G-CLOUD for an A.I/ML Type Application - martinpb
Wanted to get HNs opinion - Who’s platform and stack do you like the best for AI applications?
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redhale
This knowledge is dated about a year, which is an eternity in this space, so
take it with a grain of salt.

I do not know anything about GCP, but between AWS and Azure, go with Azure if
you are at all new to this space (or if you're just looking to get something
up and running quickly to prove a concept).

AWS takes the approach of giving you the building blocks which you then must
assemble yourself. Azure gives you a silky-smooth GUI (ML Studio) with which
you can have a model up and running in literally minutes. Of course you can
also go lower-level in Azure if you want.

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martinpb
Thnx redhale! Helpful insight!

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alexnewman
For training I find wherever I can get the cheapest gpus for my training set,
usually aws is the winner. But we operate in 3 clouds. For inference it’s
complicated. A lot of that is cheaper to do on the right low
priority/spot/preemptive machine. Tpus seem to be exceptional at operations
like soft max. I wonder how well fpgas might be good at some ml applications
you might be thinking of. It all depends honestly.

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martinpb
This is one of my biggest concerns - The cost of gpu's with repeated training,
etc. That's an interesting approach to use multiple clouds; I had not thought
of that. So thank you for that insight. Cheers sir.

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abledon
Aws is most straightforward with dL ami vm. Gcloud gives credits (300$) harder
to set up tensorflow cuda env

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martinpb
I feel the same way re: GCloud...AWS/Azure seem the be the best route. Thanks
abledon!

