Engineering practice
Research tool deployment: institutional server or cloud?
Compare access, hardware dependencies and operational responsibility.
List constraints before selecting infrastructure
Begin with data conditions, intended users and compute requirements. Comparing server prices alone misses access, maintenance and dependencies.
Questions for a self-hosted environment
Check CPU, memory, GPU, storage and model compatibility. Can intended users reach the server? Who owns updates, backups and incident response? An available server does not automatically come with those responsibilities covered.
Questions for a cloud environment
Review resource specifications, billing, dependencies and access. Test from the locations of intended users rather than inferring connectivity from a provider name. Continuous operation, on-demand work and batches can have different cost profiles.
Compare the same tasks
Run identical examples in candidate environments. Record startup, task duration, concurrency limits and failures. Check whether documentation lets the receiving team reproduce deployment.
This checklist supports discovery; it does not replace environment-specific validation. Agree budget, operational ownership and handover explicitly.