Cloud infrastructure provider DigitalOcean Holdings has announced a collaboration with AMD to provide DigitalOcean customers with low-cost access to AMD Instinct GPUs starting later this year.
DigitalOcean already offers access to the Instinct GPUs but in bare metal instances. It will now offer what it calls GPU Droplets, which are built on virtualized hardware. DigitalOcean offers a Kubernetes package that can be used with GPU Droplets should customers want to use a Kubernetes based system, according to Bratin Saha, chief product and technology officer of DigitalOcean.
The GPU Droplets are available both as single and eight GPU configurations, allowing customers to optimize costs for their specific use cases. The service will at first feature the AMD MI300X GPUs and later this year add MI325X GPUs. And access is cheap; As low as $1.99/GPU per hour and promise of a simple setup process and enterprise-grade SLAs, the company stated.
DigitalOcean’s GPU Droplets are packaged such that customers get all the capabilities they need with a single click. Saha claims other cloud providers require customers to separately allocate compute, storage, networking, VPC, and other components. This adds complexity in setting up the infrastructure as well as in pricing.
“It is the difference between buying a packaged product (such as a laptop) versus buying a bag of components (such as CPU, memory, hard drives, networking cables). DigitalOcean provides the fully packaged product that makes it easy for customers to use the cloud,” said Saha.
“Unlike other providers, we provide the same flat monthly rate across geos, and do not tack on hidden items like variable egress and ingress fees. Customers also tell us that DigitalOcean reduces their cost of ownership by more than 30% while providing an easy-to-use cloud service with similar SLAs,” he added.
In addition to these new GPUs, customers will also have access to AMD Developer Cloud, a new platform powered by DigitalOcean that is purpose-built for rapid, high-performance AI development. Customers will have access to a fully managed environment that provides instant access to AMD Instinct MI300X GPUs with zero hardware investment or local setup required.
AMD Developer Cloud provides the tools and flexibility to get started fine-tuning LLMs, benchmarking inference performance, and building a scalable inference stack.
Source:: Network World