Spent a night making my own GPU startup prove its claims to me before I'd let it make them to anyone else.
Here's what triggered it: our pricing calculator let people select up to 512 GPUs. I looked at that number and realized I had no idea if we could actually deliver past 8. So I stopped everything and made us test it, live, no simulations, no "should work."
Rented real GPUs across two providers. Fired concurrent load tests, 3 simultaneous large deployments across Japan, Romania, and Canada, all held at once on real machines. Found the honest edges of what we can actually do: RunPod caps every pod at 8 GPUs no matter what you pay. Vast.ai gets us to 16 GPUs on workstation cards, 4 on B200.
One request failed mid-test. Lost a race for the only big machine available on the whole marketplace at that moment. No charge, no cover-up, just a real failure in a real log.
I'm not posting this because it makes us look flawless. I'm posting it because it's the opposite, and I'd rather you find out we test our own limits than find out the hard way that we didn't.
Total cost of proving all of this: under a dollar in real cloud spend. Worth every cent.
kilawattcloud.dev