5 ms·

37signals Says Goodbye to AWS: Full S3 Migration and $10M in Projected Savings

101 points by bluedino 1y ago

janalsncm 1y ago
I see something analogous happening in about 5 years with LLMs when people realize they can get 80% of the value for 20% of the cost by using an on-site model rather than paying out the nose to OpenAI.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
datadrivenangel 1y ago
Do note that it took them ~2 years to move off of S3. The ROI of getting off of compute and hosted services is often there, but S3 is still pretty great from a business perspective.
- mchusma 1y ago
  I’ve become increasingly frustrated with AWS because of this. They used to have a culture of providing constant price performance improvements. Not anymore. Every release has questionable improvements (for example, switching from r6 to r7 family of instances is more expensive with theoretically better performance but you probably can’t actually switch and save money). S3 costs haven’t gone done in a long time despite plummeting storage costs. Very excited about the work done by 37Signals to encourage moving off.
thesis 1y ago
[flagged]
bcoughlan 1y ago
Something an older and wiser programmer taught me, is to think of the infrastructure costs as a per-user cost. These numbers look enormous next to my bank balance, but if you save 500k per year to service 1 million users, it's nothing to your bottom line. Meanwhile there's the opportunity cost of moving. All of the people who put effort into this migration, who could otherwise be building something revenue-generating. I think that's why in many companies cloud costs are a problem, but never enough to make it high up the backlog.
- ndriscoll 1y ago
  Building revenue generating things is hard (you have to figure out new things that people will pay for). Writing new features also requires generally different skill sets than operating servers. Running software in a datacenter is a more defined problem with straightforward ROI.
- jimlawruk 1y ago
  > building something revenue-generating "a pound saved is a pound earned"
- DoesntMatter22 1y ago
  Saving 2 million a year for a company their size is guaranteed more money in their pocket. Revenue generating features may or may not do that.
  - jakupovic 1y ago
    More money in the company pocket. More work for the people who did the migration and now maintaining their own cloud. Then when the people who put this together leave, the rest are stuck with one of a kind cloud. Maybe a good idea, but if it's only saving money that can only happen 1 time, then people expect the same cost going forward ...
    - DoesntMatter22 1y ago
      They already had a team of people that handled this stuff. AWS requires a lot of maintenance on it's own sort.
    - hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
      I can’t speak to 37signals specifically, but most on prem tech is pretty standardized. There’s nothing particularly bespoke about throwing RHEL on Dell servers running in a 3rd party managed white glove data center.
    - nchmy 1y ago
      They open sourced the entire deployment apparatus that they built to do all of this - it is simple to use. They'll have no issues maintaining it or finding new people if/when needed. And, if you bothered reading, there's significant annual savings, into perpetuity. Because aws is a racket.
cube00 1y ago
Just goes to show how greedy AWS has become with pricing now that everyone is locked in. If anything they should be able to use their scale to make it cheaper than doing it on-prem and all the costs that go with that. Strangely at the time it did appear cheaper when we all moved to cloud for these so called savings a decade ago.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  it does appear cheaper because you can handle the highest workloads for just a fraction of the total cost if you had to host the highest workload yourself. Like lets say my company gets a very huge spike and lets say I wanted to be prepared for it for all times in baremetal, then I had to had a lot of vacant free metal. But I personally believe that a dual strategy should be used, a minimum amount of stuff should be baremetal for the average traffic and only for huge spikes should cloud be used. Except, clouds seem to be a lock-in, so people prefered the clouds untill the cloud started raining and asking them for a big ton of money.
  - dumbledoren 1y ago
    > just a fraction of the total cost if you had to host the highest workload yourself. Like lets say my company gets a very huge spike and lets say I wanted to be prepared for it for all times in baremetal, then I had to had a lot of vacant free metal Huh? Autoscaling turned out to be a myth. Even in k8, you cant make users wait for nodes to come online, so you have to always have spare nodes waiting. And the spare nodes must be in proportion to regular spikes you expect and additionally any unexpected spike that you estimate. Why would that be different from having extra free metal for much cheaper and simpler? Along with an easier time finding infra people who can manage that as opposed to finding expensive talent with the expensive bloat of technical knowledge that AWS today requires? Lets face it - this is the enshittification of infra brought by the lock-in Amazon was able to lure the orgs into. First, they locked-in everyone. Now they are squeezing everyone dry.
    - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
WD-42 1y ago
Good for them. It is becoming tiring paying rent seekers to run our own software.
troyvit 1y ago
> The company estimates it will save more than $10 million over the next five years, reducing its annual infrastructure bill from $3.2 million to less than $1 million — all managed by the same technical team that previously handled the cloud. It would be cool to get more into this. One of the reasons my (much smaller) org insists on S3 (or possibly R2) is that they feel they are paying rent for the infrastructure management that they would otherwise have to hire for. If there was data out there that showed that an org could switch to a less managed infrastructure without pulling people off of other projects to fill in the gaps it would be an awesome selling point.
- adamcharnock 1y ago
  This is exactly what we do (but now you mention this I think we should spell this out much more clearly to our potential customers) We move companies onto bare metal, effectively giving them their own private cloud. This about halves their costs, doesn’t impact their engineering team as we handle the migration, and then we also include ongoing monthly engineering time to support their infra team. Overall it is a win-win for everyone (well, except AWS) (https://lithus.eu https://lithus.eu)
  - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
    by bare metal, are we saying things like hetzner, ovh? or full on, renting servers spaces themselves like railway?(I am not sure if it was railway or render) did a while back
    - adamcharnock 1y ago
      It’s both, we can rack up hardware if there is the need. But building, racking, and financing servers is a fairly well solved problem (especially here in the EU). So, in general, if we can avoid solving that problem ourselves we will.
- al_borland 1y ago
  I’ve been on a team managing on-prem data centers for nearly 2 decades at a larger place. At one point they did a study to see if it would be cheaper to go to AWS, and the conclusion was that it was cheaper to run our own. We have some stuff in the public cloud now, but it’s still more expensive than running our own. One of the biggest things I see, at least on the surface, is that there are certain sunk costs with on-prem. If you can do more with the same hardware (licensing costs aside), it really doesn’t cost much to add a VM or container. Whereas with the public cloud everything comes with a price tag and there is a much greater cost to leaving your dev server running when not actively using it, or that pet project that is helpful, but not in a way that’s quantifiable in dollars and cents. This is how companies end up with old laptops in closets and under desks running critical tools.
rawgabbit 1y ago
I remember when the discussion was how to escape the lock-in by hardware vendors such as EMC and Dell. I believe a lot of initial desire to go cloud was the idea it was easier to migrate from AWS to Azure to GCP if necessary. Now we know that such migrations are multi year efforts. Exactly like in the bad old days.
- betaby 1y ago
  > I remember when the discussion was how to escape the lock-in by hardware vendors such as EMC and Dell. Somehow I've never heard about EMC/Dell in a context of the lock-in.
  - devonbleak 1y ago
    All the times I heard about lock-in was a vendor trying to get me to avoid locking into their competitor and lock into them.
  - rawgabbit 1y ago
    Twenty years ago if you bought a multi million dollar SAN from EMC, the rep would tell you the included support would be free if you also bought X Y or Z. If you bought a data center widget from another vendor, it may void your support agreement etc.
RaSoJo 1y ago
>>all managed by the same technical team that previously handled the cloud. Does this imply they haven’t hired any additional personnel? I would’ve thought moving everything in-house would need more hands on deck—for stuff like security, keeping things up and running, and all the behind-the-scenes stuff AWS usually takes care of. If they managed with the same team, that’s darned impressive.
- zerotolerance 1y ago
  Much of the work "security, keeping things up and running" that AWS does behinds the scenes is bolstered due to the nature of running a massively complicated multi-tenant cloud. Doing exactly what you need in-house is orders of magnitude simpler, but has a deeper knowledge requirement. The cloud is a powerful way for companies to commoditize skill.
  - hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
    I’m not sure where this idea that the cloud doesn’t need skill to manage comes from. Cloud engineers are extremely highly paid because they need to be extremely skilled. No one running stuff on prem is compiling Linux from the kernel and then building a few packages onto the hardware they built manually after designing a networking infrastructure in their office building’s basement. You’re paying for enterprise software with support and best practices and sensible defaults provided to you, running on enterprise level hardware with support, best practices, sensible defaults configured, running in professional data centers where the data center firms manage maintenance, repair, etc while also managing physical security and other risks. If anything, the support you can get from all the on prem providers is far superior to what the cloud providers are giving you.
gnabgib 1y ago
Related It's five grand a day to miss our S3 exit (187 points, 1 month ago, 176 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43489698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43489698
flaminHotSpeedo 1y ago
I think the only interesting & substantive piece of info here is that AWS will sometimes waive DTO fees. (For once I'm actually thankful for GDPR!) Their claimed savings are suspect, borderline clickbait, and even if they are correct the preconditions to realize those savings don't apply to the vast majority of other companies. They already had datacenters and claim that there will be no increased opex for things like power, network (which must be substantial if they pay 1.5MM for 18PB) and employees, only needed a trivial amount of space they already had, and sounds like they're sacrificing redundancy too.
Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
Just my two cents on this topic. What we are looking for, are easier migrations in cloud I suppose and multi cloud strategy. I am pretty sure that 37Signals had gotten their servers set up in a lot of countries for easier latency but a lot of companies can't. We are then forced to use S3 or the likes and honestly I am starting to wonder about S3.... Like I was watching theo's video on everything being a wrapper and he mentioned that in some sense he basically created uploadthing because s3 was cheaper but had higher egress and cloudflare r2 was more expensive but had no egress and so he wanted a way to optimize it... thus uploadthing. But this whole idea seems so bizarringly stupid to me, I had seen a website which compared such providers pricing and to be quite frank, cloudflare was in the lowest maybe only more expensive than backblaze or wasabi but both of these had a sort of fair use limit which might be vague... In the meanwhile, I have found another website giving some decent comparisons and though I don't like its UI as much as the other website which had some really cool graphs.., its also well built and professional https://www.s3compare.io/ https://www.s3compare.io/ and I have to say, somebody might see the amazon 4$ per Tb compared to cloudflare 15$ per tb and could've said wow maybe theo was right... untill they saw the 90.00 USD/tb... I mean, I get that but if that has to be an archive / very rarely accessed, then why not just use wasabi or backblaze (I was going to prefer backblaze untill I saw the 10$ per tb egress for backblaze and 0 $ for wasabi.... yeah) wasabi/backblaze both seems to be really great options, they are just fractionally more expensive than Aws s3 glacier (4.99$ per Tb) and they don't have egregious egress fees.... For something more frequent, use cloudflare r2 and for archiving/backup, use wasabi/backblaze , maybe even the 3-2-1 strategy... I am not sure if wasabi/backblaze already follow that
rthnbgrredf 1y ago
18 PB is not a trivial amount of storage. I think what most people always underestimate is how much engineering effort it takes in the background to keep such big infrastructure up and running reliably. I would like to have a detailed total cost of ownership calculation. Of course, renting hardware - let's say in Hetzner or some other cheap provider - is always cheaper than AWS or any other major cloud provider in simple 1:1 pricing comparison. So that is nothing new. But the pure CPU/RAM/SSD costs is just a fraction of what it really costs to run such infrastructure.
- jbverschoor 1y ago
  It’s 2000 8tb SSDs ($1m), or a thousand 18TB disks ($350k) Times something for redundancy / backup. The hardware investment is back within a year. This is about what I would say many aws services cost. After a year, you’re just giving away your margin to Amazon. The original story for EC2 was ephemeral, short lived/on-demand compute. This was during the time when map-reduce was all the hype.
jerjerjer 1y ago
> We migrated to cloud and saved $X per year > 3 years later > We migrated off the cloud and saved $Y per year A tale as old as time.
mannyv 1y ago
Tl;DR: don't use RoR in AWS because it will cost you.
dsafasdfas3232 1y ago
I'm guessing they probably could not have scaled as far and fast as they did without AWS. To me, this scalability is the cost of doing business as a younger growth company. As your workload becomes more predictable, this additional cost becomes less beneficial. I've come to see that often companies say they are saving money by moving off AWS, but much of these saving come as part of rearchitecting or optimizing their systems.
jbverschoor 1y ago
Why was not the original post posted by DHH, instead of the advertorial? https://www.linkedin.com/posts/david-heinemeier-hansson-374b18221_after-over-a-decade-on-aws-s3-its-finally-activity-7325882069325152256-qt8S/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/david-heinemeier-hansson-374b...
- adt 1y ago
  The advertorial with weird misspellings in the graphics...
  - jbverschoor 1y ago
    Image generation with text instructions are notoriously bad. It's frustrating lol
dumbledoren 1y ago
> Then when the people who put this together leave Why should they leave without creating institutional knowledge and educating those who come after them... That is how it was before the 'mainstream tech' and its 'turnover/after me, deluge' mentality took over and made shareholder capitalism made every employee a disposable cog. That is what all orgs. should return to now that the zirp ended and shareholder capitalism is kaput.
atonse 1y ago
What are good US-based dedicated server hosts? Like Hetzner but in the US?
ergocoder 1y ago
The twitter criticism is getting funnier. https://x.com/zackkanter/status/1920284851506225498 https://x.com/zackkanter/status/1920284851506225498 criticizes 37signal of missing an opportunity because they focused too much on reducing COGS. An example opportunity that this guy gave is really really random. As you guess it, it's the AI opportunity cost. Because 37Signal hasn't integrated any AI. That must be a loss! Of course, it's the AI again! https://x.com/grinich/status/1920636351139230043 https://x.com/grinich/status/1920636351139230043 (from WorkOS' CEO) criticizes 37Signal of not growing and losing to Jira and Linear because 37Signal focuses on saving a couple millions of dollars a year. Jira isn't even profitable after all these decades of "winning". It's a project management tool. What do they even spend money on? Linear is one of its kind startup. Is losing to Linear that bad? I too want to lose to Linear and make >$10,000,000 a year with my product. The response from DHH is perfect tho: https://x.com/dhh/status/1921075541672612294 https://x.com/dhh/status/1921075541672612294 "Problem is that nobody seems content to merely put their dent in the universe. No, they have to fucking own the universe. It’s not enough to be in the market, they have to dominate it. It’s not enough to serve customers, they have to capture them." Not only that, project management tool's market is fragmented. It'll never be a winner-take-all given there are hundreds of use cases / settings / industries. It's going to be extremely difficult to be Number 1. Investing in growth would kill you. Reducing COGS and staying profitable is the best way IMO.

101 points by bluedino 1y ago

I see something analogous happening in about 5 years with LLMs when people realize they can get 80% of the value for 20% of the cost by using an on-site model rather than paying out the nose to OpenAI.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

datadrivenangel 1y ago

Do note that it took them ~2 years to move off of S3. The ROI of getting off of compute and hosted services is often there, but S3 is still pretty great from a business perspective.

mchusma 1y ago
I’ve become increasingly frustrated with AWS because of this. They used to have a culture of providing constant price performance improvements. Not anymore. Every release has questionable improvements (for example, switching from r6 to r7 family of instances is more expensive with theoretically better performance but you probably can’t actually switch and save money). S3 costs haven’t gone done in a long time despite plummeting storage costs. Very excited about the work done by 37Signals to encourage moving off.

thesis 1y ago

[flagged]

bcoughlan 1y ago

Something an older and wiser programmer taught me, is to think of the infrastructure costs as a per-user cost. These numbers look enormous next to my bank balance, but if you save 500k per year to service 1 million users, it's nothing to your bottom line. Meanwhile there's the opportunity cost of moving. All of the people who put effort into this migration, who could otherwise be building something revenue-generating. I think that's why in many companies cloud costs are a problem, but never enough to make it high up the backlog.

ndriscoll 1y ago
Building revenue generating things is hard (you have to figure out new things that people will pay for). Writing new features also requires generally different skill sets than operating servers. Running software in a datacenter is a more defined problem with straightforward ROI.
jimlawruk 1y ago
> building something revenue-generating "a pound saved is a pound earned"
DoesntMatter22 1y ago
Saving 2 million a year for a company their size is guaranteed more money in their pocket. Revenue generating features may or may not do that.
- jakupovic 1y ago
  More money in the company pocket. More work for the people who did the migration and now maintaining their own cloud. Then when the people who put this together leave, the rest are stuck with one of a kind cloud. Maybe a good idea, but if it's only saving money that can only happen 1 time, then people expect the same cost going forward ...
  - DoesntMatter22 1y ago
    They already had a team of people that handled this stuff. AWS requires a lot of maintenance on it's own sort.
  - hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
    I can’t speak to 37signals specifically, but most on prem tech is pretty standardized. There’s nothing particularly bespoke about throwing RHEL on Dell servers running in a 3rd party managed white glove data center.
  - nchmy 1y ago
    They open sourced the entire deployment apparatus that they built to do all of this - it is simple to use. They'll have no issues maintaining it or finding new people if/when needed. And, if you bothered reading, there's significant annual savings, into perpetuity. Because aws is a racket.

cube00 1y ago

Just goes to show how greedy AWS has become with pricing now that everyone is locked in. If anything they should be able to use their scale to make it cheaper than doing it on-prem and all the costs that go with that. Strangely at the time it did appear cheaper when we all moved to cloud for these so called savings a decade ago.

Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
it does appear cheaper because you can handle the highest workloads for just a fraction of the total cost if you had to host the highest workload yourself. Like lets say my company gets a very huge spike and lets say I wanted to be prepared for it for all times in baremetal, then I had to had a lot of vacant free metal. But I personally believe that a dual strategy should be used, a minimum amount of stuff should be baremetal for the average traffic and only for huge spikes should cloud be used. Except, clouds seem to be a lock-in, so people prefered the clouds untill the cloud started raining and asking them for a big ton of money.
- dumbledoren 1y ago
  > just a fraction of the total cost if you had to host the highest workload yourself. Like lets say my company gets a very huge spike and lets say I wanted to be prepared for it for all times in baremetal, then I had to had a lot of vacant free metal Huh? Autoscaling turned out to be a myth. Even in k8, you cant make users wait for nodes to come online, so you have to always have spare nodes waiting. And the spare nodes must be in proportion to regular spikes you expect and additionally any unexpected spike that you estimate. Why would that be different from having extra free metal for much cheaper and simpler? Along with an easier time finding infra people who can manage that as opposed to finding expensive talent with the expensive bloat of technical knowledge that AWS today requires? Lets face it - this is the enshittification of infra brought by the lock-in Amazon was able to lure the orgs into. First, they locked-in everyone. Now they are squeezing everyone dry.
  - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago

WD-42 1y ago

Good for them. It is becoming tiring paying rent seekers to run our own software.

troyvit 1y ago

> The company estimates it will save more than $10 million over the next five years, reducing its annual infrastructure bill from $3.2 million to less than $1 million — all managed by the same technical team that previously handled the cloud. It would be cool to get more into this. One of the reasons my (much smaller) org insists on S3 (or possibly R2) is that they feel they are paying rent for the infrastructure management that they would otherwise have to hire for. If there was data out there that showed that an org could switch to a less managed infrastructure without pulling people off of other projects to fill in the gaps it would be an awesome selling point.

adamcharnock 1y ago
This is exactly what we do (but now you mention this I think we should spell this out much more clearly to our potential customers) We move companies onto bare metal, effectively giving them their own private cloud. This about halves their costs, doesn’t impact their engineering team as we handle the migration, and then we also include ongoing monthly engineering time to support their infra team. Overall it is a win-win for everyone (well, except AWS) (https://lithus.eu https://lithus.eu)
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  by bare metal, are we saying things like hetzner, ovh? or full on, renting servers spaces themselves like railway?(I am not sure if it was railway or render) did a while back
  - adamcharnock 1y ago
    It’s both, we can rack up hardware if there is the need. But building, racking, and financing servers is a fairly well solved problem (especially here in the EU). So, in general, if we can avoid solving that problem ourselves we will.
al_borland 1y ago
I’ve been on a team managing on-prem data centers for nearly 2 decades at a larger place. At one point they did a study to see if it would be cheaper to go to AWS, and the conclusion was that it was cheaper to run our own. We have some stuff in the public cloud now, but it’s still more expensive than running our own. One of the biggest things I see, at least on the surface, is that there are certain sunk costs with on-prem. If you can do more with the same hardware (licensing costs aside), it really doesn’t cost much to add a VM or container. Whereas with the public cloud everything comes with a price tag and there is a much greater cost to leaving your dev server running when not actively using it, or that pet project that is helpful, but not in a way that’s quantifiable in dollars and cents. This is how companies end up with old laptops in closets and under desks running critical tools.

rawgabbit 1y ago

I remember when the discussion was how to escape the lock-in by hardware vendors such as EMC and Dell. I believe a lot of initial desire to go cloud was the idea it was easier to migrate from AWS to Azure to GCP if necessary. Now we know that such migrations are multi year efforts. Exactly like in the bad old days.

betaby 1y ago
> I remember when the discussion was how to escape the lock-in by hardware vendors such as EMC and Dell. Somehow I've never heard about EMC/Dell in a context of the lock-in.
- devonbleak 1y ago
  All the times I heard about lock-in was a vendor trying to get me to avoid locking into their competitor and lock into them.
- rawgabbit 1y ago
  Twenty years ago if you bought a multi million dollar SAN from EMC, the rep would tell you the included support would be free if you also bought X Y or Z. If you bought a data center widget from another vendor, it may void your support agreement etc.

RaSoJo 1y ago

>>all managed by the same technical team that previously handled the cloud. Does this imply they haven’t hired any additional personnel? I would’ve thought moving everything in-house would need more hands on deck—for stuff like security, keeping things up and running, and all the behind-the-scenes stuff AWS usually takes care of. If they managed with the same team, that’s darned impressive.

zerotolerance 1y ago
Much of the work "security, keeping things up and running" that AWS does behinds the scenes is bolstered due to the nature of running a massively complicated multi-tenant cloud. Doing exactly what you need in-house is orders of magnitude simpler, but has a deeper knowledge requirement. The cloud is a powerful way for companies to commoditize skill.
- hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
  I’m not sure where this idea that the cloud doesn’t need skill to manage comes from. Cloud engineers are extremely highly paid because they need to be extremely skilled. No one running stuff on prem is compiling Linux from the kernel and then building a few packages onto the hardware they built manually after designing a networking infrastructure in their office building’s basement. You’re paying for enterprise software with support and best practices and sensible defaults provided to you, running on enterprise level hardware with support, best practices, sensible defaults configured, running in professional data centers where the data center firms manage maintenance, repair, etc while also managing physical security and other risks. If anything, the support you can get from all the on prem providers is far superior to what the cloud providers are giving you.

gnabgib 1y ago

Related It's five grand a day to miss our S3 exit (187 points, 1 month ago, 176 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43489698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43489698

flaminHotSpeedo 1y ago

I think the only interesting & substantive piece of info here is that AWS will sometimes waive DTO fees. (For once I'm actually thankful for GDPR!) Their claimed savings are suspect, borderline clickbait, and even if they are correct the preconditions to realize those savings don't apply to the vast majority of other companies. They already had datacenters and claim that there will be no increased opex for things like power, network (which must be substantial if they pay 1.5MM for 18PB) and employees, only needed a trivial amount of space they already had, and sounds like they're sacrificing redundancy too.

Imustaskforhelp 1y ago

Just my two cents on this topic. What we are looking for, are easier migrations in cloud I suppose and multi cloud strategy. I am pretty sure that 37Signals had gotten their servers set up in a lot of countries for easier latency but a lot of companies can't. We are then forced to use S3 or the likes and honestly I am starting to wonder about S3.... Like I was watching theo's video on everything being a wrapper and he mentioned that in some sense he basically created uploadthing because s3 was cheaper but had higher egress and cloudflare r2 was more expensive but had no egress and so he wanted a way to optimize it... thus uploadthing. But this whole idea seems so bizarringly stupid to me, I had seen a website which compared such providers pricing and to be quite frank, cloudflare was in the lowest maybe only more expensive than backblaze or wasabi but both of these had a sort of fair use limit which might be vague... In the meanwhile, I have found another website giving some decent comparisons and though I don't like its UI as much as the other website which had some really cool graphs.., its also well built and professional https://www.s3compare.io/ https://www.s3compare.io/ and I have to say, somebody might see the amazon 4$ per Tb compared to cloudflare 15$ per tb and could've said wow maybe theo was right... untill they saw the 90.00 USD/tb... I mean, I get that but if that has to be an archive / very rarely accessed, then why not just use wasabi or backblaze (I was going to prefer backblaze untill I saw the 10$ per tb egress for backblaze and 0 $ for wasabi.... yeah) wasabi/backblaze both seems to be really great options, they are just fractionally more expensive than Aws s3 glacier (4.99$ per Tb) and they don't have egregious egress fees.... For something more frequent, use cloudflare r2 and for archiving/backup, use wasabi/backblaze , maybe even the 3-2-1 strategy... I am not sure if wasabi/backblaze already follow that

rthnbgrredf 1y ago

18 PB is not a trivial amount of storage. I think what most people always underestimate is how much engineering effort it takes in the background to keep such big infrastructure up and running reliably. I would like to have a detailed total cost of ownership calculation. Of course, renting hardware - let's say in Hetzner or some other cheap provider - is always cheaper than AWS or any other major cloud provider in simple 1:1 pricing comparison. So that is nothing new. But the pure CPU/RAM/SSD costs is just a fraction of what it really costs to run such infrastructure.

jbverschoor 1y ago
It’s 2000 8tb SSDs ($1m), or a thousand 18TB disks ($350k) Times something for redundancy / backup. The hardware investment is back within a year. This is about what I would say many aws services cost. After a year, you’re just giving away your margin to Amazon. The original story for EC2 was ephemeral, short lived/on-demand compute. This was during the time when map-reduce was all the hype.

jerjerjer 1y ago

> We migrated to cloud and saved $X per year > 3 years later > We migrated off the cloud and saved $Y per year A tale as old as time.

mannyv 1y ago

Tl;DR: don't use RoR in AWS because it will cost you.

dsafasdfas3232 1y ago

I'm guessing they probably could not have scaled as far and fast as they did without AWS. To me, this scalability is the cost of doing business as a younger growth company. As your workload becomes more predictable, this additional cost becomes less beneficial. I've come to see that often companies say they are saving money by moving off AWS, but much of these saving come as part of rearchitecting or optimizing their systems.

jbverschoor 1y ago

Why was not the original post posted by DHH, instead of the advertorial? https://www.linkedin.com/posts/david-heinemeier-hansson-374b18221_after-over-a-decade-on-aws-s3-its-finally-activity-7325882069325152256-qt8S/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/david-heinemeier-hansson-374b...

adt 1y ago
The advertorial with weird misspellings in the graphics...
- jbverschoor 1y ago
  Image generation with text instructions are notoriously bad. It's frustrating lol

dumbledoren 1y ago

> Then when the people who put this together leave Why should they leave without creating institutional knowledge and educating those who come after them... That is how it was before the 'mainstream tech' and its 'turnover/after me, deluge' mentality took over and made shareholder capitalism made every employee a disposable cog. That is what all orgs. should return to now that the zirp ended and shareholder capitalism is kaput.

atonse 1y ago

What are good US-based dedicated server hosts? Like Hetzner but in the US?

ergocoder 1y ago

The twitter criticism is getting funnier. https://x.com/zackkanter/status/1920284851506225498 https://x.com/zackkanter/status/1920284851506225498 criticizes 37signal of missing an opportunity because they focused too much on reducing COGS. An example opportunity that this guy gave is really really random. As you guess it, it's the AI opportunity cost. Because 37Signal hasn't integrated any AI. That must be a loss! Of course, it's the AI again! https://x.com/grinich/status/1920636351139230043 https://x.com/grinich/status/1920636351139230043 (from WorkOS' CEO) criticizes 37Signal of not growing and losing to Jira and Linear because 37Signal focuses on saving a couple millions of dollars a year. Jira isn't even profitable after all these decades of "winning". It's a project management tool. What do they even spend money on? Linear is one of its kind startup. Is losing to Linear that bad? I too want to lose to Linear and make >$10,000,000 a year with my product. The response from DHH is perfect tho: https://x.com/dhh/status/1921075541672612294 https://x.com/dhh/status/1921075541672612294 "Problem is that nobody seems content to merely put their dent in the universe. No, they have to fucking own the universe. It’s not enough to be in the market, they have to dominate it. It’s not enough to serve customers, they have to capture them." Not only that, project management tool's market is fragmented. It'll never be a winner-take-all given there are hundreds of use cases / settings / industries. It's going to be extremely difficult to be Number 1. Investing in growth would kill you. Reducing COGS and staying profitable is the best way IMO.