FYI I’m now doing basically this on GCS and before that, on Azure. If the data is in the same region, typically I’m getting about 50% speed compared to if the data is on a local (fast) SSD. I’m actually caching the dataset as it’s downloaded, so only the 1st epoch will be slower.
EDIT: here https://gist.github.com/harpone/1ce4c775ff63e22bc5228c4c77b48604 231