Data centers are wildly expensive to operate if you want proper security, redundancy, reliability, recoverability, bandwidth, scale elasticity, etc.
And when I say security, I'm not just talking about software level security, but literal armed guards are needed at the scale of a company like Figma.
Bandwidth at that scale means literally negotiating to buy up enough direct fiber and verifying the routes that fiber takes between data centers.
At one of the companies I worked at, it was not uncommon to lose data center connectivity because a farmer's tractor cut a major fiber line we relied on.
Scalability might include tracking square footage available for new racks in physical buildings.
As long as your company is profitable, at anything but Facebook like scale, it may not be worth the trouble to try to run your own data center.
Even if the cloud doesn't save money, it saves mental energy and focus.
There’s a ton of middle ground between a fully managed cloud like AWS and building your own hyperscaler datacenter like Facebook.
Renting a few hundred cabinets from Equinix or Digital Realty is going to potentially be hugely cheaper than AWS, but you probably need a team of people to run it. That can be worthwhile if your growth is predictable and especially if your AWS bandwidth bill is expensive.
But then you’re building on bare metal. Gotta deploy your own databases, maybe kubernetes for running workloads, or something like VMware for VMs. And you don’t get any managed cloud services, so that’s another dozen employees you might need.
This is a 20-years-ago take. If your datacenter provider doesn't have multiple fiber entry into the building with multiple carriers, you chose the wrong provider at this point.
Data centers are wildly expensive to operate if you want proper security, redundancy, reliability, recoverability, bandwidth, scale elasticity, etc.
And when I say security, I'm not just talking about software level security, but literal armed guards are needed at the scale of a company like Figma.
Bandwidth at that scale means literally negotiating to buy up enough direct fiber and verifying the routes that fiber takes between data centers.
At one of the companies I worked at, it was not uncommon to lose data center connectivity because a farmer's tractor cut a major fiber line we relied on.
Scalability might include tracking square footage available for new racks in physical buildings.
As long as your company is profitable, at anything but Facebook like scale, it may not be worth the trouble to try to run your own data center.
Even if the cloud doesn't save money, it saves mental energy and focus.