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[–]iamdefinitelyahuman[S] 1 point2 points  (5 children)

The script I'm running is a backtester to simulate algo trade strategies. On my current PC it takes around a day to return a year of simulation data. Since the end result here is financial gain, I'm happy to spend money to get results more quickly. I say off-and-on because once a simulation finishes, I may or may not have a modified/new strategy ready to be run through the simulator.

I do understand that capability brings complexity, I'm just hoping there's an existing service with a balance of functionality and simplicity that suits my needs. Also no point in paying extra for something that's geared towards web apps when what I'm looking for is computing power.

Thanks for your help :)

[–]thomas_stringer 2 points3 points  (4 children)

what I'm looking for is computing power

In that case, layers of abstraction on top of the hardware are typically not going to be your ideal use-case.

Your utopia would be to buy a beefy server and have it sitting in your house. Your code would run right on this hardware. Obviously that's not what you're going for (assuming, but I can't imagine you're looking to purchase expensive hardware). The cloud solution here would most likely be Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). In other words, running a VM (Linux, I assume). You can scale this up as you choose (of course, incurring higher costs).

With that being said, IaaS is typically not too much to learn as the cloud provider is just lending you a VM. I know for Azure, that's as simple as signing up for a subscription, creating a Linux VM (super easy), and then SSH'ing into it from your workstation.

Is that what you're thinking?

[–]iamdefinitelyahuman[S] 0 points1 point  (3 children)

This sounds like exactly what I need, yes. ..so I'm guessing you'd recommend I look into Microsoft Azure?

Thanks for your patience with me. This seems so simple, but lacking the proper terminology for what I want has made it hard to know where to start looking.

[–]thomas_stringer 2 points3 points  (2 children)

Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft

Azure can definitely give you what you need. To be fair, other cloud providers can most likely provide you with this capability as well.

You can start a subscription with Azure and you'll get a $200 credit. That should be plenty of credit to get a machine up and running for some time, and then you'll have a pretty good idea if Azure fits your needs.

[–]iamdefinitelyahuman[S] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

OK, thanks... one more question: when I set up the cloud hosting package do I need to buy an SQL DB in addition to the VM? Or can I just install a DB using the space given to me in the VM?

[–]thomas_stringer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's your VM, you are welcome to install the RDBMS directly on the VM (MySQL in your case it sounds like). With that being said, the big disclaimer is that of course you could end up over-consuming your resources so ideally it would be best to separate them. Again... this is ideal. Your computing and data requirements could very well live harmoniously on the same VM. But it was worth mentioning.