Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud

Re:Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud by antimius3000 on Friday March 10, 2023 @09:58AM (#35095069)

In the last 15 years that I've seen this type of clickbait, 100% of the time it's written by someone who doesn't know how to make a TCO calculation. Of course, this time was no different. Should have saved myself the agony after reading the first sentence: "Clouds for IT infrastructure are so popular lately that moving into the cloud has become a trend.". Please.

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Re:Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud by nik736 on Friday March 10, 2023 @10:01AM (#35095120)

So let us know what is wrong and how a proper TCO calculation looks like. What's missing?

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Re:Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud by dtech on Friday March 10, 2023 @10:08AM (#35095222)

Anything that you have to do "extra" compared to managing the hardware yourself.

E.g. this article is missing even basic stuff like the (prorated) salary costs of employees buying, installing and servicing the hardware.

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Re:Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud by oxfordmale on Friday March 10, 2023 @10:35AM (#35095677)

For example, hardware doesn't just survive five years. As the hardware ages, the failure rate will increase. This calculation doesn't even mention this at all.

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Re:Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud by thesh4d0w on Friday March 10, 2023 @06:06PM (#35102551)

They're using Dell and I would assume bought a 5 year warranty, so they don't have to factor that in.

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Re:Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud by oxfordmale on Friday March 10, 2023 @06:57PM (#35103108)

Regardless of a warranty, the hardware still fails and needs to be replaced. That requires maintenance. Beyond that, can they afford to wait for Dell to fix the faulty device or send a replacement, or do they need several spare units to address outages quickly.

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Re:Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud by humanistbot on Friday March 10, 2023 @10:18AM (#35095385)

> E.g. this article is missing even basic stuff like the (prorated) salary costs of employees buying, installing and servicing the hardware.

You say that like you don't need a dedicated team to manage AWS.

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Re:Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud by OtomotO on Friday March 10, 2023 @10:28AM (#35095551)

Ah, so now the developers will service the AWS instances from your end which means they can work less on delivering new features... also left out of the equation quite often :)

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Re:Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud by sokoloff on Friday March 10, 2023 @10:49AM (#35095912)

They’ll also wait less for IT to service their tickets requesting new infrastructure, which leads to more new feature development. There are a variety of trade-offs; not all of them have the same sign.

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Re:Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud by fidgewidge on Friday March 10, 2023 @06:40PM (#35102925)

Do you think that would make any impact at all when they'd be looking at a $400M difference in hardware costs? People these days act like you need 5 PhDs to plug in a computer, it's insane.

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Re:Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud by quest88 on Friday March 10, 2023 @10:18AM (#35095384)

Yea, give us your template antimius3000.

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Re:Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud by KyeRussell on Friday March 10, 2023 @10:15AM (#35095345)

Yep. A completely natural instance of “computer nerd thinks that their expertise is transferrable”. The tech industry is rife with this sort of thinking.

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Re:Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud by linksnapzz on Friday March 10, 2023 @10:31AM (#35095601)

In this case, the nerd has a point, and is probably correct.

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Re:Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud by manv1 on Friday March 10, 2023 @11:49AM (#35096930)

The thing is, his TCO would include training, rebuilding their existing processes and procedures, and having to run stuff in parallel for a while. That's not including a re-architecture and the impact it would have on their stuff today.

Sometimes all people need is a big box in a data center. Management of the environment is already a sunk cost. The hardware is already expensed. They don't care about scalability/DR/etc.

From a hard dollar point of view staying colo makes sense. Plus politically they don't want to do it, which is really the only point of view that mattered.

If they needed to have actual DR then the numbers would be different.

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