Basecamp-Maker 37Signals Says Its 'Cloud Exit' Will Save It $10 Million Over 5 Years (arstechnica.com) 15
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: 37Signals is not a company that makes its policy or management decisions quietly. The productivity software company was an avowedly Mac-centric shop until Apple's move to kill home screen web apps (or Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs) led the firm and its very-public-facing co-founder, David Heinemeier Hansson, to declare a "Return to Windows," followed by a stew of Windows/Mac/Linux. The company waged a public battle with Apple over its App Store subscription policies, and the resulting outcry helped nudge Apple a bit. 37Signals has maintained an active blog for years, its co-founders and employees have written numerous business advice books, and its blog and social media posts regularly hit the front pages of Hacker News.
So when 37Signals decided to pull its seven cloud-based apps off Amazon Web Services in the fall of 2022, it didn't do so quietly or without details. Back then, Hansson described his firm as paying "an at times almost absurd premium" for defense against "wild swings or towering peaks in usage." In early 2023, Hansson wrote that 37Signals expected to save $7 million over five years by buying more than $600,000 worth of Dell server gear and hosting its own apps.
Late last week, Hansson had an update: it's more like $10 million (and, he told the BBC, more like $800,000 in gear). By squeezing more hardware into existing racks and power allowances, estimating seven years' life for that hardware, and eventually transferring its 10 petabytes of S3 storage into a dual-DC Pure Storage flash array, 37Signals expects to save money, run faster, and have more storage available. "The motto of the 2010s and early 2020s -- all-cloud, everything, all the time -- seems to finally have peaked," Hansson writes. "And thank heavens for that!" He adds the caveat that companies with "enormous fluctuations in load," and those in early or uncertain stages, still have a place in the cloud.
So when 37Signals decided to pull its seven cloud-based apps off Amazon Web Services in the fall of 2022, it didn't do so quietly or without details. Back then, Hansson described his firm as paying "an at times almost absurd premium" for defense against "wild swings or towering peaks in usage." In early 2023, Hansson wrote that 37Signals expected to save $7 million over five years by buying more than $600,000 worth of Dell server gear and hosting its own apps.
Late last week, Hansson had an update: it's more like $10 million (and, he told the BBC, more like $800,000 in gear). By squeezing more hardware into existing racks and power allowances, estimating seven years' life for that hardware, and eventually transferring its 10 petabytes of S3 storage into a dual-DC Pure Storage flash array, 37Signals expects to save money, run faster, and have more storage available. "The motto of the 2010s and early 2020s -- all-cloud, everything, all the time -- seems to finally have peaked," Hansson writes. "And thank heavens for that!" He adds the caveat that companies with "enormous fluctuations in load," and those in early or uncertain stages, still have a place in the cloud.
Why did this take them 10 years to figure out? (Score:1)
We already knew the cloud was just an easy but expensive solution for startups or an expensive way to temporarily scale out one's infra.
Re: (Score:3)
It's one of those things that "everyone knows" but no-one really knows. In our case (small obscure company) all it took was some bored geek sitting down and pricing out what a cloud version would cost once you went past the kiddie-level joke stuff (1 CPU, 2GB RAM, almost no disk space) and how rapidly the graph climbed after that, vs. the cost of a second-hand Dell server or two and half a day to set it up, and it was a complete no-brainer.
But most companies who aren't run by geeks won't know that, and in
I am a psychic (Score:2)
Progressive Web Apps (Score:4, Insightful)
Also known to those of my generation as "the mainframe model":
- You don't own what you pay for
- The software vendor changes whatever they want willy-nilly and if you don't like it, tough cookie
- When the software vendor fucks up and introduces bugs or vulnerabilities, you can't hold off the upgrade until it's fixed
- If you have a problem and you're a small company, customer service is nonexistent or insulting at best because you're not worth the software vendor's time
- The software vendor can charge you repeatedly whatever they want in perpetuity because you don't buy a license, you buy a subscription
When the personal computer came about, we couldn't get enough of it: finally computers would be yanked out of the greedy hands of IBM and the likes and we'd be free to do what we want on our own term. Finally!
And now we're right back where we started. The more things change, the more they stay the same...
Re: Progressive Web Apps (Score:2)
I was CTO of a company when it got sold. (Score:1)
The new board wanted everything in the cloud. We went from 10k a year to 800k. And still had the same staffing.
I'd be the first one to tell you (Score:2)
When my latest client wanted the SAAS I was writing to be hosted on Amazon or Microsoft cloud, I wasn't too happy. It would have been cheaper for me to co-locate a couple of servers in data centers, but they were adamant about it. So I doubled my hosting cost and hosted a virtual instance on Amazon. Yes, it costs more than any server I would have put together, but ...
1) I made the client pay for it
2) I don't have to worry about hardware issues
3) I don't have to worry about unauthorized, physical access t
Cloud is for startups (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I've worked for an undisclosed world-wide food processing machines company for years, and it seems a perfect example on how to make bad decisions in IT.
The good thing was connecting all the different brand companies with one international network. After that there was migrating to terminal servers for branch offfices (at my local company) which only had a meager few MB bandwidth ADSL connection, made worse by giving everyone who whined enough a laptop instead of a terminal client.
Then came the centralisatio
The real news is... (Score:2)
... that AWS is even more expensive than Pure Storage? Wow!
Clexit? (Score:1)
remove the "ex" and shorten it to four letters.
Company plays lift-and-shift (Score:3)
Surprised to discover that it's more expensive.
This is pretty much EVERY failed cloud journey in a nutshell and provides significant evidence 37Signals shouldn't be viewed as techxperts on cloud. Ever.
I am permanently surprised that Azure remains cheaper than on-prem despite all the accounts of how expensive cloud is. Then again, proper prep and planning meant we didn't just build big, stupidly expensive, VMs in the cloud. SaaS offers significant value. Storage is a damned site cheaper and requires zero maintenance . Visibility and service offering to business is signficantly improved with no need to force business through gateways or, even worse, VPNs.
That being said, pretty sure one of the internal AWS teams announced a year or so ago that they dropped AWS micro-services because of the cost. They were not wrong. The value propisition there is negative all the way.
What was the point of moving to the Cloud again (Score:2)