The savings promised in reduced complexity never materialized. So we’re making our plans to leave.
The cloud excels at two ends of the spectrum,
when your application is so simple and low traffic
when your load is highly irregular.
Do you know how many insanely beefy servers you could purchase on a budget of half a million dollars per year?
The savings will all be there in labor costs! Except no. Anyone who thinks running a major service like HEY or Basecamp in the cloud is “simple” has clearly never tried. Some things are simpler, others more complex, but on the whole, I’ve yet to hear of organizations at our scale being able to materially shrink their operations team, just because they moved to the cloud.
It strikes me as downright tragic that this decentralized wonder of the world is now largely operating on computers owned by a handful of mega corporations. If one of the primary AWS regions go down, seemingly half the internet is offline along with it. This is not what DARPA designed!