A large tech organization explains why they left the Cloud, and how much they have benefited from doing so:
Just over a year ago, we announced our intention to leave the cloud. We then shared our complete $3.2 million cloud budget for 2022, and the fact that we were going to build our own tooling rather than pay for overpriced enterprise service contracts. The mission was set!
A month later, we placed an order for $600,000 worth of Dell servers to carry our exit, and did the math to conservatively estimate $7 million in savings over the next five years. We also detailed the larger values, beyond just cost, that was driving our cloud exit. Things like independence and loyalty to the original ethos of the internet.
Still in February, we announced the new tool I had bootstrapped in a few weeks to take us out of the cloud – without giving up on all the innovation in containers and operating principles from the cloud. This was the introduction of Kamal.
Shortly thereafter, all the hardware we needed for our cloud exit arrived on pallets in our two geographically-dispersed data centers. All 4,000 vCPUs, 7,680GB of RAM, and 384TB of NVMe storage of it!
And then, in June, it was done. We had left the cloud.
To say this journey was controversial is putting it mildly. Millions of people read the updates on LinkedIn, X, and by following this very mailing list. I got thousands of comments asking for clarification, providing feedback, and expressing incredulity over our nerve to zig when others were still busy catching up to the zag.
But the proof was in the pudding. Not only did we complete our cloud exit quickly, customers scarcely noticed anything, and soon the savings started to mount. Already in September, we’d secured a million dollars in savings on the cloud bill. And as the reserved instances (where you prepay for a whole year in advance to get better pricing) started to expire, the bill just kept collapsing:
I’ve never trusted the Cloud. And I’m very pleased to be able to say that as of last week, we no longer have a single project that is on the Cloud. While it may be useful in the initial stages of a project that isn’t capable of sustaining itself, the sooner one can move off the Cloud and onto one’s own servers, the better off one is likely to be.
And that doesn’t even begin to get into the peril of relying upon a corporation filled with SJWs who enjoy nothing more than playing thought police and denying corporate services to anyone they don’t like or of whom they don’t approve.
On a not-unrelated note, the Arktoons devs have successfully defeated a DDOS attack on the site. It’s good to be able to handle these things on our own, and not be dependent upon the security of the Cloud services company. If you were having problems accessing the site last night, it should be fine today.