More and more companies are ditching the cloud. Here's why.
Companies such as 37 Signals and GEICO are ditching the cloud.
The primary reason: Costs. Especially storage costs. According to a GEICO spokesperson, “storage in the cloud is one of the most expensive things you can do in the cloud, followed by AI in the cloud.”
Is your SaaS currently on the cloud? Do you plan to get (back) to bare servers?
I've communicated with Senior Level Architects and there is a shift moving back to BareMetal on-prem Platforms over the cloud. Tech has taught me a lot about cycles.
Kamal is an awesome tool for simple docker deployments. I highly recommend it. Works great with Rails, but can be used for any containerized project.
I think exiting the cloud can be difficult, but if you are planning to, then definitely consider containerizing your apps first!
I'm currently employed as Head of Platform at a large UK company. I come from a time before the cloud but spend all my time with AWS. It's incredibly expensive. Not just storage but, everything. Compute is what impacts us the most. We're currently looking at the larger group and seeing what we can pull back to physical machines.
It was inevitable. Using the cloud is still a great option for smaller companies, but if you've got the personnel for managing bare metal, why use a middle-man.
The real thing to consider is whether or not you have spiky traffic, vs consistent and reliable growth. If you have large bursts of users, your server(s) can become overloaded quickly. Adding new physical servers quickly based on traffic spikes is not an easy task.
I think a more reasonable approach for most companies doing the cloud exit is to have the ability to spin up additional cloud VMs behind a load balancer, when required.
This is fascinating - how long until we see other big company names follow suit? Sounds like massive cost savings on the table.
The whole idea in the beginning was that it would be cheaper as well.