Another Major Online Player Leaves the Cloud
Hey Too Gets Off of Their Cloud.
Basecamp’s Web Startup Concludes “The Cloud is Really Expensive”
Yet another major online player looked at their bills and determined that the cloud is not the place for them. Basecamp launched hosted email service Hey in June, 2020 following two years of developing the new platform.
Hey has run on AWS (Amazon Web Services) and in Google Cloud. They’ve also run their infrastructure on bare metal machines and Kubernetes. Four years into the establishment of the company and two-and-a-half years following its launch the company’s chief technology officer David Heinemeier Hansson reported:
“We’ve seen all the cloud has to offer and tried most of it. It’s finally time to conclude: Renting computers is (mostly) a bad deal for medium-sized companies like ours with stable growth. The savings promised in reduced complexity never materialized.”
Hansson isolates two situations where cloud usage makes sense.
An application that’s very simple and low traffic introduced by a company that has no customers. If the company grows, it’ll need to find another IT infrastructure solution, but it’s great to get started.
An app with a load that is highly irregular, difficult to predict, and the company has, as Hansson puts it, “wild swings or towering peaks” in usage. Hey had 300,000 users try its service in three weeks, ten times more than they anticipated capturing in six months. When they started, the capacity of the cloud was a godsend.
If your company doesn’t fit one of these segments, having the public cloud as your primary IT infrastructure solution likely isn’t much of a solution at all.
Takeaways For Pennsylvania Enterprises from Hey’s Cloud Experience
Those of us responsible for infrastructure decisions need to ask the following question. “If Hey, a well-funded startup with top talent running IT infrastructure, cannot make the cloud work economically, who can?”
At Direct LTx, our target market is established companies in Eastern Pennsylvania and the Middle Atlantic region with data center and interconnection needs. Many companies in our region have existing data centers that are reaching the end of their useful life. For them, migrating current servers to a colocation data center makes a lot more sense than taking on the capital expenditures that come with a refresh of data center infrastructure. Direct LTx also maintains, runs, and secures the data center infrastructure, freeing up our customers’ employees to work more directly on their customers’ experience rather than on data center infrastructure.
Paying more attention to budgets and less to hype has been illustrative for many organizations. Companies continue to be encouraged to run their infrastructure primarily on AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure by consultants, vendors, board members, or just the overall hype of the cloud. And many of them who do so have a similar experience as Hey, without the large, highly paid staff of cloud engineers and infrastructure architects to overcome it.
Hansson’s piece is an honest, experience-based overview of Hey’s time in the public cloud and is worthy of a read as you evaluate your infrastructure strategy moving forward.
Another Look at Public Cloud: Are you and your team trying to determine whether the cloud, colocation, owning and operating a data center, or some hybrid combination of those factors are best for your future? Direct LTx just published 8 Key Questions for Every Philly IT Decision-Maker: Will Your Data Center and Cloud Strategy Propel Your Organization to Success or Leave You Behind the Times in our Challenging Market? For your copy of this white paper, visit THIS PAGE of our site!