Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

37signals Leaves the Cloud

world.hey.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 93 posts

Re: 37signals Leaves the Cloud

#2

Post by vikeri »

Curious to know how to which degree they are self hosting, seems they'll buy their own servers but I doubt they'll go all the way to buying land and building their own data centers?

Re: 37signals Leaves the Cloud

#3

Post by Nextgrid »

vikeri wrote: post #2

Curious to know how to which degree they are self hosting, seems they'll buy their own servers but I doubt they'll go all the way to buying land and building their own data centers?

It would make little sense when there are plenty of bare-metal providers who are happy to provide this as a service at a reasonable price.

Re: 37signals Leaves the Cloud

#5

Post by commitpizza »

Very interesting post! I think there will be a movement away from the cloud in the coming time. People will realize that the cloud comes with it's problems when regulations come down, governments require companies to spy on them etc.

The only way of being really sure of what is going on is to own it yourself. Unfortunately that has become more and more important.

Re: 37signals Leaves the Cloud

#6

Post by Nextgrid »

klelatti wrote: post #4

Could anyone expand on why it makes sense for Netflix to use AWS so extensively?

The bulk of the media is served from appliances they give out to ISPs, so their AWS costs might be reasonable.

It's also a huge company and a massive distributed system, so moving that off from AWS is an insane amount of effort and there might be legitimate benefits from AWS' management and autoscaling layer that aren't as valuable for 37Signals which runs simpler, monolithic systems.

Re: 37signals Leaves the Cloud

#7

Post by klelatti »

Nextgrid wrote: post #6
klelatti wrote: post #4

Could anyone expand on why it makes sense for Netflix to use AWS so extensively?

The bulk of the media is served from appliances they give out to ISPs, so their AWS costs might be reasonable. It's also a huge company and a massive distributed system, so moving that off from AWS is an insane amount of effort and there might be legitimate benefits from AWS' management and autoscaling layer that aren't as valuable for 37Signals which runs simpler, monolithic systems.

Thanks - I'm guessing that they get a great deal from AWS too.

Re: 37signals Leaves the Cloud

#8

Post by senttoschool »

So their AWS bill is $500k/year.

Hire one person to buy, configure, manage hardware is what? $250k/year? And is this self-hosting more reliable than AWS? For an email service, you'd think that you want the most reliable host.

Weird.

Re: 37signals Leaves the Cloud

#9

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

Very valid points. Its hard to describe the complexities and weird error or latency or other conditions that happen in cloud environments. OPs people kinda shrug and ask that you essentially turn it off and back on again and that usually resolves the issue at that time. There are so many abstraction layers when all the infrastructure is software run and I bet a lot of those introduce performance degradation.

Another element of this is I would think its more fun for a systems person to be closer to the hardware. Specifying, ordering and unboxing servers, disks, switches and setting things up sounds satisfying to me.

Post reply on HN