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Aren't there businesses for which self-hosting save far more money? Infra is often a financial decision as much as technical. (reminds me of basecamp exiting

by aatd86 3y ago

Aren't there businesses for which self-hosting save far more money? Infra is often a financial decision as much as technical. (reminds me of basecamp exiting the cloud but I know nothing more than that)

klooney 3y ago
Yeah. For a lot of SaaS companies, their entire profit margin is about state management (in Kafka, elastic, HDFS, whatever). There's a huge incentive to squeeze that part of the stack for cost efficiency.
icelancer 3y ago
Yes. After factoring in labor, our $XXmm company saves low-mid six figures per year by self-hosting the majority of our infra.
candiddevmike 3y ago
Truthfully I think you'll find with a thorough review of most SaaS SLAs that they are more expensive than the toil they say they replace. Otherwise how would the company make money? It's still engineers doing X work. There really aren't that many opportunities for economies of scale with enterprise SaaS when you have SLAs and data sovereignty unless you're cutting corners.
- dikei 3y ago
  >> It's still engineers doing X work. There really aren't that many opportunities for economies of scale with enterprise SaaS when you have SLAs and data sovereignty unless you're cutting corners. Not really, SaaS built specialized automaton to reduce the engineering effort so that they can scale better. Therefore, if the users need to spend 1 hour/day on their infra, the SaaS can spend the same amount time to manage infra for 100s customer. In some extreme cases, the software run by the SaaS is completely different to what the regular users use. For example, Confluence Cloud Kafka service does NOT actually run Kafka underneath, but a proprietary system called Kora that speak Kafka protocol.
dgb23 3y ago
Yes. There are plenty of examples of going down the abstraction stack and saving money among other things. I believe the question is really high level and strategic and there’s no one size fits all.
j45 3y ago
Saving money can be one consideration. Not having the amount of expertise or hours on hand to support it can be another. Shadow labour costs can add up pretty quick and some orgs like offsetting that to the vendor to not overload their people. Another consideration is how much the tech aligns with your core business. Just because you need it doesn’t mean you should build or run a ticketing system. Too often there is a lot of SharePoint whiplash and problem “solutions” that grew out of control. Large orgs don’t always behave rationally and pragmatically when there is self preservation or politics at play instead of being effective at your work.

by aatd86 3y ago

klooney 3y ago

Yeah. For a lot of SaaS companies, their entire profit margin is about state management (in Kafka, elastic, HDFS, whatever). There's a huge incentive to squeeze that part of the stack for cost efficiency.

icelancer 3y ago

Yes. After factoring in labor, our $XXmm company saves low-mid six figures per year by self-hosting the majority of our infra.

candiddevmike 3y ago

Truthfully I think you'll find with a thorough review of most SaaS SLAs that they are more expensive than the toil they say they replace. Otherwise how would the company make money? It's still engineers doing X work. There really aren't that many opportunities for economies of scale with enterprise SaaS when you have SLAs and data sovereignty unless you're cutting corners.

dikei 3y ago
>> It's still engineers doing X work. There really aren't that many opportunities for economies of scale with enterprise SaaS when you have SLAs and data sovereignty unless you're cutting corners. Not really, SaaS built specialized automaton to reduce the engineering effort so that they can scale better. Therefore, if the users need to spend 1 hour/day on their infra, the SaaS can spend the same amount time to manage infra for 100s customer. In some extreme cases, the software run by the SaaS is completely different to what the regular users use. For example, Confluence Cloud Kafka service does NOT actually run Kafka underneath, but a proprietary system called Kora that speak Kafka protocol.

dgb23 3y ago

Yes. There are plenty of examples of going down the abstraction stack and saving money among other things. I believe the question is really high level and strategic and there’s no one size fits all.

j45 3y ago

Saving money can be one consideration. Not having the amount of expertise or hours on hand to support it can be another. Shadow labour costs can add up pretty quick and some orgs like offsetting that to the vendor to not overload their people. Another consideration is how much the tech aligns with your core business. Just because you need it doesn’t mean you should build or run a ticketing system. Too often there is a lot of SharePoint whiplash and problem “solutions” that grew out of control. Large orgs don’t always behave rationally and pragmatically when there is self preservation or politics at play instead of being effective at your work.