As much as I like the cloud, there is a (somewhat sentimental) part of me that likes the idea of running your own hardware. Not so much the potential money saved, although that's nice, but the feeling that you own your own infrastructure rather than rent somebody else's. It's a sovereignty thing.
Puzzle for HN though, surely as interest rates go UP, the business case for investing in your own hardware is WORSE?
So you would expect the current trend to be to IN to cloud, right? Unless you're sitting on talent to turn data centers into gold (which, you're probably not, maybe DHH is, I do feel there's some risk DHH is overestimating his co-workers long term hardware support enthusiasm, I guess we will find out over the next few years?).
If you're at the point where exiting cloud makes sense for you - that's cool and not unthinkable, depends what you're doing, and at what scale. Bandwidth is a big one...
Sure, you can build your own Dropbox. All you need is cheap drives, right?
Seriously, there is a place for the cloud, and keeping your operations there. And there is also a place for running everything yourself. You just have to be brutally honest with yourself and everyone else about what ALL the costs are, both monetary and otherwise, before you make that decision.
In the end, I think many people who go the self-hosted route actually have a much higher TCO than if they used the cloud. Yes, their monetary costs might go up substantially, but there are also non-monetary costs that I think would go down substantially. And I think the latter usually tend to outweigh the former.
Of course, one thing that you have to do when operating in the cloud is to make sure you keep a close eye on all those costs.
The price of freedom is perennial vigilance. And there's a 24x7x365 cost to be paid for perennial vigilance.
Just a sub-department at a MA_NG spends $12+ M/year at __A__WS because they're too fucking dainty to do managed colo or rack-and-stack themselves.
I'm curious how much N spends nowadays. $100+ M still?
Do less computation more efficiently and you won't need to spend obscene amounts on gold-plated rented servers. Capacity plan and manage TCO rather than set money alight.
I see quite a bit of golang talent out there actually, and crucially, golang is a quite "simple" small language to learn. At least enough to be productive... I picked it up in a couple of weeks.
We transitioned many folks off python or node in short order.
