The Cloud Is Just Other People's Computers

Well, and there is another organization's profit stream to consider. We have left the cloud

The people selling the benefits of the cloud, are also selling cloud services. See the quote from Buffett for a reality check.

The back of the napkin math is that we'll save at least $1.5 million per year by owning our own hardware rather than renting it from Amazon. And crucially, we've been able to do this without changing the size of the operations team at all. Running our applications in the cloud just never provided the promised productivity gains to do with any smaller of a team anyway.

This is possible because the way we operate our own hardware actually isn't too dissimilar from how people use rental clouds like AWS. We buy new hardware from Dell, have it shipped directly to the two data centers we use, and ask the white-glove service hands at Deft to rack the new machines. Then we see the new IP addresses pop online, and can immediately put them to work

Somehow this reminds me of the outsourcing that was so popular in the 1990s. Until the cost of the contracts came home.

Look at it this way. We spent about half a million dollars buying two pallets of servers from Dell, which added a combined 4,000 vCPUs with 7,680 GB of RAM and 384TB of NVMe storage to our server capacity. This hardware was more than adequate to run all the heritage services we brought home, together with HEY, and give our other Basecamp operations a hardware refresh. And it was less than a third the cost of what we predict we'll be saving EVERY YEAR! This is hardware we'll be amortizing over five years.

Hat tip to Pixy Misa at Ambient Irony. Daily News Stuff 6 July 2023: Disembroken Edition

They spent half a million dollars on hardware to save one and a half million per year on cloud services.

That must be some profit stream.