[SassyGrapefruit]

I would like to see some real numbers on this. I spend between $5 and $6 million a year on infrastructure. I have a physical datacenter in a Colo and two clouds AWS and Azure. I have detailed KPIs on my spend. One of the KPIs is total cost of ownership of an instance or server. My physical instances cost 3 times as much as the exact same compute in the cloud.

This is because I have to factor all the costs. This includes electricity, maintenance, incident response, networking, renting the cage, vendored software for backups, threat detection, fire suppression, equipment upgrades, licensing, alerting, and it goes on and on and on...

I'd challenge you to break down the full cost of owning a server as you see it. I bet you will miss 75% of the actual costs involved. I promise short of seizing a colo like its Nakatomi Plaza and running it at gunpoint you will never in a million years come close to the total ownership cost of cloud instance. You can't compete with the economies of scale and the caliber of the engineering.

[jdlshore]

37signals disagrees. They’re moving off the cloud and have published several blog entries about the process and the approx ~1mm/yr (fully loaded) they expect to save.

I don’t have a horse in this race, but it’s interesting that your experiences are so different. Would love to hear your take on their numbers.

The most recent article, with lots of hard numbers, is here:

https://dev.37signals.com/our-cloud-spend-in-2022/

There was a recent article that made the HN in front page that broke down the savings they expected, but I’m on mobile and can’t find it now. Something about “two datacenter racks.”

[SassyGrapefruit]

Where are the numbers and how do they calculate them? This article lists their cloud spend in detail then "waves hands" at the Datacenter costs simply saying "it will be far far less". Ok why not break it down?

I don't understand how they are going to achieve that. Does it include routers, switches, IPS's? What about the costs associated with having a physically wired network instead of a software defined network.

Also they state they are region redundant which is probably way overboard. Will they be protected if they lose their entire datacenter? Will they flop over to another geo? If not then you must consider not their current spend but their spend if they were single region. That would further eat into proposed savings.

Don't get me wrong, I do believe you can achieve cost parity in a Datacenter but you need a certain level of scale. I am skeptical that it can be done at $3 million in spend.