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.”
https://world.hey.com/dhh/we-stand-to-save-7m-over-five-year...
Yep read that guys blog history and the agenda just pops right out. It's not just about cost for Basecamp its ideological. I can't help but imagine this bias leaks into the financial and operational calculations.
We had a similar situation. We had a team did not want to move to the cloud, the business forced them, so they built the system in a way that fought the cloud. Then the self fulfilling prophecy kicked into high gear. "See we told you it was a bad idea, look at all the problems we have!". The problems were created through half baked attempts to be "agnostic" to the cloud. Once we removed those elements we were able to reduce the cost of the system by over 90%. It was far cheaper than when it was running in the Colo. These folks had no interest in optimizing for cloud native execution they were already planning their move back into the Colo.
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.