8 ms·

I don't know that 37Signals counts as a "major enterprise". Their Cloud exodus can't have been more than a few dozen servers, right? Meanwhile AWS is growing a

by jsnell 2y ago

I don't know that 37Signals counts as a "major enterprise". Their Cloud exodus can't have been more than a few dozen servers, right? Meanwhile AWS is growing at 20%/year, Azure at 33% and GCP at 35%. That doesn't seem compatible with any kind of major cloud repatriation trend.

WaxProlix 2y ago
How much of that is what technologists would consider "cloud" (IAAS, PAAS) versus what someone on the business side of things would consider "cloud" - office365, google gsuite, etc?
- tiffanyh 2y ago
  Given that AWS is doing $100B in annual revenue and still growing at 17% YoY ... and they do NOT have a collaboration suite (office/gsuite) - it'd say at least for AWS it's nearly all IaaS/PaaS. https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/amazon_q1_2024/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/amazon_q1_2024/
  - gonzo41 2y ago
    I'd agree on IaaS/PaaS being the main driver. Id guess that everyone is running away from serverless offerings from all the main cloud providers. It's just day 1 lock in to a platform with no shared standards. It's very uncompetitive and kind of slow to innovate.
    - discodave 2y ago
      Amazon loves it when you run idle EC2 instances ($$$) rather than using Lambda. Most real workloads I've seen (at 3 startups, and several teams at Amazon) have utilization under 10%.
      - _heimdall 2y ago
        That's really where you see that no answer is right across the board. I worked at a very small startup years ago that leaned heavily on EC2. Our usage was pretty bipolar, the service was along the lines of a real-time game so we either had a very heavy work load or nothing. We stood up EC2 instances when games were lice and wound them down after. We did use Lambda for a few things, mainly APIs that were rarely used or for processing jobs in an event queue. Serverless has its place for sure, but in my experience it have been heavily over used the last 3-5 years.
      - Dylan16807 2y ago
        I think the solution to that problem is usually to have fewer and smaller EC2 instances. And you only need to get utilization up to like 15% to make reserved instances significantly better than lambda.
    - jiggawatts 2y ago
      We’re migrating over a hundred apps to Azure App Service. One has an issue with the platform-enforced HTTP timeout maximum values. I migrated that app back to a VM in an hour. It turns out that the “integration” for something like App Service (or CloudRun or whatever) is mostly just best practices for any kind of hosting: parameters read from environment variables, immutable binaries with external config, stateless servers, read only web app folders, monitoring with APMs, etc… Sure, you’ll experience lockin if you use Durable Functions or the similar Lambda features… but no worse than any other workflow or business rules platform. Ask people how easy it is to get off BizTalk or MuleSoft…
  - exabrial 2y ago
    Not to naysay, any idea of that includes their own website? Just curious. I don’t az itself is the largest aws customer anymore.
  - travem 2y ago
    It may not be as popular but they do have Amazon WorkDocs > Amazon WorkDocs is a document storage, collaboration, and sharing system. Amazon WorkDocs is fully managed, secure, and enterprise scale. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/workdocs/latest/developerguide/what_is.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/workdocs/latest/developerguide/w...
    - bobnamob 2y ago
      I weep for Amazon leadership, forcing themselves to use workdocs over quip is self sabotage imo
    - ghaering 2y ago
      This service has been discontinued recently, with a bunch of others that lacked adoption from customers.
- Izikiel43 2y ago
  Afaik, MSFT shows growth in Azure and Office as separate things during earning reports, so the % mentioned before is just Azure, and 31% is huge.
- jsnell 2y ago
  For Azure, all of it. Microsoft clumps Azure together with their server software (e.g. Windows Server, SQL Server) licensing when reporting the revenue, but give more fine-grained information on growth rates. This is the latter. (We also know the Azure business was already massive at $34 billion in 2022, since it got revealed during one of Microsoft's ongoing antitrust cases.) For Google, I'm not aware of a reliable way of estimating the GCP vs. Workspace numbers. But they get asked it during earnings calls, and the answer has always been that the GCP growth is substantially faster than the Workspace growth.
- mr_toad 2y ago
  I’ve worked with a few organisations that I’d call “late adopters” to the cloud, and it’s rare for them to use IAAS or even PAAS. It’s all SAAS and serverless, and while they all say they’re doing devops it’s almost always clickops.
- kreims 2y ago
  I’d suspect there is significant growth of businesses acting as intermediaries for cloud storage. I think that other software providers have also realized that ransoming users data is a great way to extract predictable, hedge-fund-owner-pleasing revenue without performing useful work. AEC software providers all do this. ProjectWise is worse than owning or renting a plain file server in every way I can imagine, yet every consultant in transportation dutifully cuts Bentley a five-figure check or larger every year so they can hold your project files hostage and pretend to develop software. I pray for a merciful asteroid to end it all.
joshdavham 2y ago
> That doesn't seem compatible with any kind of major cloud repatriation trend. Agreed. I don't think this is a real trend, at least not right now. Also, fwiw, I'm really not a fan of these types of articles that identify like a small handful of people or organizations doing something different and calling it a "trend".
- weikju 2y ago
  Submarine like articles trying to create a trend I suppose.
panrobo 2y ago
aws and other hyperscalers will keep growing, no doubt. Public cloud adoption is at around 20%. So the new companies that migrate into the cloud will keep the growth going. That doesn't deny the fact that some might be repatriating though. Especially ones that couldn't get the benefits out of the cloud.
- windexh8er 2y ago
  One thing I've seen in every startup I've been in over the last decade is that cloud asset management is relatively poor. Now I'm not certain that enterprise is better or worse, but ultimately when I think back 10+ years ago resources were finite. With that limitation came self-imposed policing of utilization. Looking at cloud infrastructure today it is very easy for organizations to lose sight on production vs frivolous workloads. I happen to work for an automation company that has cloud infrastructure monitoring deployed such that we get notified about the resources we've deployed and can terminate workloads via ChatOps. Even though I know that everyone in the org is continuously nagged about these workloads I still see tons of resources deployed that I know are doing nothing or could be commingled on an individual instance. But, since the cloud makes it easy to deploy we seem to gravitate towards creating a separation of work efforts by just deploying more. This is/was rampant in every organization I've been a part of for the last decade with respect to cloud. The percentage of actual required, production workloads in a lot of these types of accounts is, I'd gather, less than 50% in many cases. And so I really do wonder how many organizations are just paying the bill. I would gather the Big cloud providers know this based on utilization metrics and I wonder how much cloud growth is actually stagnant workloads piling up.
  - happymellon 2y ago
    The major corps I've worked in that did cloud migrations spent so much time on self-sabotage. Asset management is always poor, but thats half because control over assets ends up being wrestled away from folks by "DevOps" or "SREs" making K8S operators that just completely fuck up the process. The other half is because they also want "security controls" and ensure that all the devs can't see any billing information. How can I improve costs if I can't tell you the deltas between this month and last?
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
"In parallel, GEICO, one of the largest automotive insurers in the United States, is actively repatriating many workloads from the cloud as part of a comprehensive architectural overhaul." Is GEICO a major enterprise
- adamc 2y ago
  Per google, more than 30,000 employees, so I'd say enterprise-scale, sure. One of the biggest? No, but not tiny or even medium-sized.
  - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
    Insurance companies tend to have far more capital than their employee numbers would suggest. Particularly Geico, who are famously cheap.
    - wbl 2y ago
      "Have" is an interesting word. Much of that capital is covering a bad year in Florida or California.
PittleyDunkin 2y ago
You can have multiple trends at once. Veteran cloud users leaving, international business onboarding.
- dhfuuvyvtt 2y ago
  And then there's me: never left the datacenter in the first place.
  - hggigg 2y ago
    Wise person. Wish we hadn't. Managed to multiply costs 8x (no joke).
    - thrw42A8N 2y ago
      No way that is true if you did it properly. Practically nobody has a workload where this could be true - and it's definitely not a workload smaller than several DCs. It doesn't work out well if you just create some long lived EC2 instances and call it a day. But that's not really using a cloud, just a VPS - and that has indeed never been cheaper than having your own servers. You need to go cloud native if you want to save money.
      - kasey_junk 2y ago
        Any egress heavy workload can quickly cost more on cloud than on prem. Especially if you’ve got consistent egress bandwidth that can be negotiated against.
        thrw42A8N 2y ago
        If it's so heavy that you pay 8x the price of deployment and maintenance of physical servers then you're either very small in which case I'm surprised you don't need the flexibility, or you have many options to make a deal. Don't accept the listed prices.
andrewstuart 2y ago
37 Signals has enterprise scale influence in some software development circles.I’m no fan of them but they have it right on this one. Revolutions cannot start huge, they must start small.
ksec 2y ago
37signals spends more than $3M a year on cloud. So while it definitely isn't a major enterprise. It is also a lot more than a a few dozen servers. I am not anti-cloud and pro cloud. My major problem with the new trend is that a lot of people are basically rediscovering pre "Cloud" era. which is VPS, Dedicated server and Colocation. And people are suggesting Hetzner or OVH or many other players are equivalent to AWS. While I dont disagree AWS is charging a lot for their offering, putting AWS to other services isn't even a valid comparison. Completely ignoring the basics such as Server / CPU / RAM / SSD quality. Network quality such as interconnect, redundancy, as well as Data Center quality. If you rally want to do simple price and spec comparison you might as well go to Lowendbox to find a low cost VPS which some people have been doing since 2008. I really wish there is a middle ground somewhere before using Hyperscalers. Both DO / Linode couldn't reach a larger scale. Hetzner is expanding their Cloud offering only and no dedicated outside EU.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  > 37signals spends more than $3M a year on cloud. Isn’t most of that just S3 storage/bandwidth?
  - jgalt212 2y ago
    If so, they should move to R2.
- RateMyPE 2y ago
  Yep, Hetzner, OVH or even DO aren't even close to offering what AWS offers. Once you start exploring all the things they have to offer you understand why so many large companies use hyperscalers. Although to be fair, most hobbyists only need basic services like cloud servers/VMs, and hyperscalers like AWS are an awful deal compared to other options if you only need compute + storage + bandwidth. You don't need to use S3, Lambdas and Cloudfront to host a personal blog, a simple VPS will be more than enough. It feels like most devs nowadays prefer using services that abstract away the infrastructure, at the cost of not developing SysOps skills, so I don't see a future where the Cloud is going to lose relevance.
everdrive 2y ago
I sincerely doubt 37 signals has "a few dozen servers." Every company I've been in has a huge, sprawling cloud and that no one has governance over. New instances are stood up by individual teams in order to avoid bureaucratic delay, and these propagate indefinitely.
leftcenterright 2y ago
> Their Cloud exodus can't have been more than a few dozen servers, right? "At the moment we have somewhere between 20-25 servers in each cab, or about 90 servers in each site. Here’s what the rack layout looks like in Chicago, for instance." - https://dev.37signals.com/37signals-datacenter-overview/ https://dev.37signals.com/37signals-datacenter-overview/ Their "server count" is definitely much higher than what you are thinking.
hulitu 2y ago
> Azure at 33% Forcing people to use OneDrive surely has an effect. /s

by jsnell 2y ago

WaxProlix 2y ago

How much of that is what technologists would consider "cloud" (IAAS, PAAS) versus what someone on the business side of things would consider "cloud" - office365, google gsuite, etc?

tiffanyh 2y ago
Given that AWS is doing $100B in annual revenue and still growing at 17% YoY ... and they do NOT have a collaboration suite (office/gsuite) - it'd say at least for AWS it's nearly all IaaS/PaaS. https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/amazon_q1_2024/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/amazon_q1_2024/
- gonzo41 2y ago
  I'd agree on IaaS/PaaS being the main driver. Id guess that everyone is running away from serverless offerings from all the main cloud providers. It's just day 1 lock in to a platform with no shared standards. It's very uncompetitive and kind of slow to innovate.
  - discodave 2y ago
    Amazon loves it when you run idle EC2 instances ($$$) rather than using Lambda. Most real workloads I've seen (at 3 startups, and several teams at Amazon) have utilization under 10%.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      That's really where you see that no answer is right across the board. I worked at a very small startup years ago that leaned heavily on EC2. Our usage was pretty bipolar, the service was along the lines of a real-time game so we either had a very heavy work load or nothing. We stood up EC2 instances when games were lice and wound them down after. We did use Lambda for a few things, mainly APIs that were rarely used or for processing jobs in an event queue. Serverless has its place for sure, but in my experience it have been heavily over used the last 3-5 years.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      I think the solution to that problem is usually to have fewer and smaller EC2 instances. And you only need to get utilization up to like 15% to make reserved instances significantly better than lambda.
  - jiggawatts 2y ago
    We’re migrating over a hundred apps to Azure App Service. One has an issue with the platform-enforced HTTP timeout maximum values. I migrated that app back to a VM in an hour. It turns out that the “integration” for something like App Service (or CloudRun or whatever) is mostly just best practices for any kind of hosting: parameters read from environment variables, immutable binaries with external config, stateless servers, read only web app folders, monitoring with APMs, etc… Sure, you’ll experience lockin if you use Durable Functions or the similar Lambda features… but no worse than any other workflow or business rules platform. Ask people how easy it is to get off BizTalk or MuleSoft…
- exabrial 2y ago
  Not to naysay, any idea of that includes their own website? Just curious. I don’t az itself is the largest aws customer anymore.
- travem 2y ago
  It may not be as popular but they do have Amazon WorkDocs > Amazon WorkDocs is a document storage, collaboration, and sharing system. Amazon WorkDocs is fully managed, secure, and enterprise scale. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/workdocs/latest/developerguide/what_is.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/workdocs/latest/developerguide/w...
  - bobnamob 2y ago
    I weep for Amazon leadership, forcing themselves to use workdocs over quip is self sabotage imo
  - ghaering 2y ago
    This service has been discontinued recently, with a bunch of others that lacked adoption from customers.
Izikiel43 2y ago
Afaik, MSFT shows growth in Azure and Office as separate things during earning reports, so the % mentioned before is just Azure, and 31% is huge.
jsnell 2y ago
For Azure, all of it. Microsoft clumps Azure together with their server software (e.g. Windows Server, SQL Server) licensing when reporting the revenue, but give more fine-grained information on growth rates. This is the latter. (We also know the Azure business was already massive at $34 billion in 2022, since it got revealed during one of Microsoft's ongoing antitrust cases.) For Google, I'm not aware of a reliable way of estimating the GCP vs. Workspace numbers. But they get asked it during earnings calls, and the answer has always been that the GCP growth is substantially faster than the Workspace growth.
mr_toad 2y ago
I’ve worked with a few organisations that I’d call “late adopters” to the cloud, and it’s rare for them to use IAAS or even PAAS. It’s all SAAS and serverless, and while they all say they’re doing devops it’s almost always clickops.
kreims 2y ago
I’d suspect there is significant growth of businesses acting as intermediaries for cloud storage. I think that other software providers have also realized that ransoming users data is a great way to extract predictable, hedge-fund-owner-pleasing revenue without performing useful work. AEC software providers all do this. ProjectWise is worse than owning or renting a plain file server in every way I can imagine, yet every consultant in transportation dutifully cuts Bentley a five-figure check or larger every year so they can hold your project files hostage and pretend to develop software. I pray for a merciful asteroid to end it all.

joshdavham 2y ago

> That doesn't seem compatible with any kind of major cloud repatriation trend. Agreed. I don't think this is a real trend, at least not right now. Also, fwiw, I'm really not a fan of these types of articles that identify like a small handful of people or organizations doing something different and calling it a "trend".

weikju 2y ago
Submarine like articles trying to create a trend I suppose.

panrobo 2y ago

aws and other hyperscalers will keep growing, no doubt. Public cloud adoption is at around 20%. So the new companies that migrate into the cloud will keep the growth going. That doesn't deny the fact that some might be repatriating though. Especially ones that couldn't get the benefits out of the cloud.

windexh8er 2y ago
One thing I've seen in every startup I've been in over the last decade is that cloud asset management is relatively poor. Now I'm not certain that enterprise is better or worse, but ultimately when I think back 10+ years ago resources were finite. With that limitation came self-imposed policing of utilization. Looking at cloud infrastructure today it is very easy for organizations to lose sight on production vs frivolous workloads. I happen to work for an automation company that has cloud infrastructure monitoring deployed such that we get notified about the resources we've deployed and can terminate workloads via ChatOps. Even though I know that everyone in the org is continuously nagged about these workloads I still see tons of resources deployed that I know are doing nothing or could be commingled on an individual instance. But, since the cloud makes it easy to deploy we seem to gravitate towards creating a separation of work efforts by just deploying more. This is/was rampant in every organization I've been a part of for the last decade with respect to cloud. The percentage of actual required, production workloads in a lot of these types of accounts is, I'd gather, less than 50% in many cases. And so I really do wonder how many organizations are just paying the bill. I would gather the Big cloud providers know this based on utilization metrics and I wonder how much cloud growth is actually stagnant workloads piling up.
- happymellon 2y ago
  The major corps I've worked in that did cloud migrations spent so much time on self-sabotage. Asset management is always poor, but thats half because control over assets ends up being wrestled away from folks by "DevOps" or "SREs" making K8S operators that just completely fuck up the process. The other half is because they also want "security controls" and ensure that all the devs can't see any billing information. How can I improve costs if I can't tell you the deltas between this month and last?

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

"In parallel, GEICO, one of the largest automotive insurers in the United States, is actively repatriating many workloads from the cloud as part of a comprehensive architectural overhaul." Is GEICO a major enterprise

adamc 2y ago
Per google, more than 30,000 employees, so I'd say enterprise-scale, sure. One of the biggest? No, but not tiny or even medium-sized.
- disgruntledphd2 2y ago
  Insurance companies tend to have far more capital than their employee numbers would suggest. Particularly Geico, who are famously cheap.
  - wbl 2y ago
    "Have" is an interesting word. Much of that capital is covering a bad year in Florida or California.

PittleyDunkin 2y ago

You can have multiple trends at once. Veteran cloud users leaving, international business onboarding.

dhfuuvyvtt 2y ago
And then there's me: never left the datacenter in the first place.
- hggigg 2y ago
  Wise person. Wish we hadn't. Managed to multiply costs 8x (no joke).
  - thrw42A8N 2y ago
    No way that is true if you did it properly. Practically nobody has a workload where this could be true - and it's definitely not a workload smaller than several DCs. It doesn't work out well if you just create some long lived EC2 instances and call it a day. But that's not really using a cloud, just a VPS - and that has indeed never been cheaper than having your own servers. You need to go cloud native if you want to save money.
    - kasey_junk 2y ago
      Any egress heavy workload can quickly cost more on cloud than on prem. Especially if you’ve got consistent egress bandwidth that can be negotiated against.
      - thrw42A8N 2y ago
        If it's so heavy that you pay 8x the price of deployment and maintenance of physical servers then you're either very small in which case I'm surprised you don't need the flexibility, or you have many options to make a deal. Don't accept the listed prices.

andrewstuart 2y ago

37 Signals has enterprise scale influence in some software development circles.I’m no fan of them but they have it right on this one. Revolutions cannot start huge, they must start small.

ksec 2y ago

37signals spends more than $3M a year on cloud. So while it definitely isn't a major enterprise. It is also a lot more than a a few dozen servers. I am not anti-cloud and pro cloud. My major problem with the new trend is that a lot of people are basically rediscovering pre "Cloud" era. which is VPS, Dedicated server and Colocation. And people are suggesting Hetzner or OVH or many other players are equivalent to AWS. While I dont disagree AWS is charging a lot for their offering, putting AWS to other services isn't even a valid comparison. Completely ignoring the basics such as Server / CPU / RAM / SSD quality. Network quality such as interconnect, redundancy, as well as Data Center quality. If you rally want to do simple price and spec comparison you might as well go to Lowendbox to find a low cost VPS which some people have been doing since 2008. I really wish there is a middle ground somewhere before using Hyperscalers. Both DO / Linode couldn't reach a larger scale. Hetzner is expanding their Cloud offering only and no dedicated outside EU.

ceejayoz 2y ago
> 37signals spends more than $3M a year on cloud. Isn’t most of that just S3 storage/bandwidth?
- jgalt212 2y ago
  If so, they should move to R2.
RateMyPE 2y ago
Yep, Hetzner, OVH or even DO aren't even close to offering what AWS offers. Once you start exploring all the things they have to offer you understand why so many large companies use hyperscalers. Although to be fair, most hobbyists only need basic services like cloud servers/VMs, and hyperscalers like AWS are an awful deal compared to other options if you only need compute + storage + bandwidth. You don't need to use S3, Lambdas and Cloudfront to host a personal blog, a simple VPS will be more than enough. It feels like most devs nowadays prefer using services that abstract away the infrastructure, at the cost of not developing SysOps skills, so I don't see a future where the Cloud is going to lose relevance.

everdrive 2y ago

I sincerely doubt 37 signals has "a few dozen servers." Every company I've been in has a huge, sprawling cloud and that no one has governance over. New instances are stood up by individual teams in order to avoid bureaucratic delay, and these propagate indefinitely.

leftcenterright 2y ago

> Their Cloud exodus can't have been more than a few dozen servers, right? "At the moment we have somewhere between 20-25 servers in each cab, or about 90 servers in each site. Here’s what the rack layout looks like in Chicago, for instance." - https://dev.37signals.com/37signals-datacenter-overview/ https://dev.37signals.com/37signals-datacenter-overview/ Their "server count" is definitely much higher than what you are thinking.

hulitu 2y ago

> Azure at 33% Forcing people to use OneDrive surely has an effect. /s