January 17, 2023
David Heinemeier Hansson, CTO of 37Signals, which runs the project Basecamp, has analyzed the massive cloud bills that led to the company’s decision to exit the cloud in October 2022.
He stated that the cloud bill for 2022 was $3,201,564 with a monthly payment of $266,797. While $759,983 was spent on compute via Amazon Web Services’ EC2 and EKS services.
Hansson tweeted “We spent $3,201,564.24 on cloud in 2022 at @37signals, mostly AWS. $907,837.83 on S3. $473,196.30 on RDS. $519,959.60 on OpenSearch. $123,852.30 on Elasticache. This is with long commits (S3 for 4 years!!), reserved instances, etc. Just obscene. Will publish full accounting soon.”
“Contrast that with just this one example of insanely powerful iron you can buy from Dell. The first R6525s have 256GB RAM, 3TB NVM, 2x10G net, 2x AMD EPYC 7513. Second, same, but 2x AMD EPYC 7443. So that’s a total of 288 vCPU, 15 TB NVM, 1.3TB RAM for $1,287/month over 3 years!”
Hansson also revealed that the company’s single largest cloud-related expense is $907,837.83 for storing over eight petabytes of data in AWS’s Simple Storage Service (S3).
The sources for this piece include an article in TheRegister.
