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Saving $12K on modeling jobs in AWS

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Your AWS bill is going through the roof and you don't know what steps to take? Although lots of opinion leaders have voiced the somewhat flawed statement that "AWS is cheap", the reality is different where one needs to careful monitor costs since it became as simple as pushing a button to get extra resources. AWS is still expensive: AWS has lowered its price repeatedl y  (42 times as of last year according to AWS) in the past years in a race-to-the-bottom with Google Cloud. That said, it can still run up to $17K a year for a large on-demand instance as the graph below shows: Modeling jobs are "peak demand": Modeling jobs need lots of resources for a short amount of time, days at the most. Consequently, they should be treated as peak demand which make them among the first candidates for Elastic Computing. Plus, it can easily be bundled as "Data + Instructions package" making it easy outsource it into another server. Starcluster t