> 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.
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)
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
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.
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.
Honestly when you’re a small company or starting up, when you’re unsure of how much, if any, usage your product will receive, it makes sense to start on the cloud.
And then as you grow, it makes sense to periodically check in as to whether the cloud vs on prem calculus still holds for you or not.
There is a huge place for the cloud in our eco-system. And the cloud companies have been an incredible enabler for startups especially.
The problem lies with the lie that has been peddled by the cloud companies and many others who know about little other than the cloud, that it’s always the best solution, when in reality there are many scenarios where it’s not the best solution even when you consider the cost of migrating from the cloud to on-prem.
TLDR: Whether you’re on prem, or in the cloud. Regularly assess whether your workflows will work better and/or cheaper in one or the other. With the cloud you do have the added caveat that costs have been raised significantly whereas on-prem costs have been fairly stable (and actually dropping) over time, but again, that can be a factor in your analysis.
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.