Basecamp-maker 37Signals says its “cloud exit” will save it $10M over 5 years
Basecamp-maker 37Signals says its “cloud exit” will save it $10M over 5 years
After buying its own hardware, 37Signals will be “literally deleting our AWS account come this summer.” But most firms are looking at hybrid mixes.
Note: the Ars Technica article links to a blogpost by Lydia Leong, a cloud computing analyst at Gartner, the URL seems to be broken. I believe they wanted to reference this blog post.
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It’s fascinating. In my lifetime I went from only servers to the cloud is always cheaper to the cloud really depends if it makes financial sense for your application.
I remember someone telling me the cloud is practically free ten years ago.
It was cheap 10 years ago.
Cause they wanted you to put all your business critical data there, before they raised the price.Ah, like how my employer is held hostage by VMware because they’ve come to depend on their specific software and are now getting fleeced to the max.
Business eat business world.
Mine too, but we're switching to Nutanix now.
I am curious to what extent IT repatriation is a discussion topic versus a real phenomenon. You hear a lot about this topic in the last few years, but very market-level numbers.
On a purely back on the napkin analysis, it would make sense, since AWS/Azure/gcloud would want to raise prices once they have a foothold on the market (and some of the on-perm knowledge is lost).
I think they rely on the so called "tech debt" or on-perm knowledge to retire or move on, then crank up the pricing. Everyone who went to the cloud is going to get squeezed.
already happening and the company I was at reaction was different cloud provider which required so much work to move between they are never going to see the labor savings. the cloud should theoretically give them.
The two things I see people forget when crunching the numbers:
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Cloud is a recurring cost. So you have to factor TCO over the life of the application which realistically is gonna be greater than 6 years. In those 6 years usually you’ve deprecated you’re on-premise hardware in 3-5, so those last few years are gravy, whereas with Cloud you’ll be paying the same amount year after year
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Application sizing and density. Quite often people will break out workloads on the cloud to offer better “segmentation”, but you’re paying for that division. On premise you can better utilize your resources through sharing at the hypervisor level. Couple this with people not sizing their workloads correctly (or at all) and they end up wasting a lot of money
Cloud is good for rapid prototyping, or if you don’t have the resources to spend yourself, but if you have the size and means, on-premise will almost always win the cost argument.
ETA: Another factor that businesses liked was that Cloud was a OpEx spend vs on-premise hardware being a CapEx spend and it props up your EBITDA, but that doesn’t really matter much unless you’re looking at selling your company or are a highly traded public company, but a lot of them got sucked in with that view too.
(Source: I did these calculations and pointed it out to my leadership years ago and now am finally getting the “I told you so”)
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