I’m exploring adding storage in our data center so VM and bare-metal customers can keep their data between runs. The backend is already built, we save VM data to an S3-compatible API. What we’re missing is the physical storage.
Once that’s in place, you could pick up almost immediately where you left off. The experience would feel much like running locally: power off when you’re done, power on when you’re ready, and keep going.
You’d pay for what you use, pay a much smaller amount when you don't need it, without the upfront cost of buying hardware that’s much slower than our supercomputers.