Basecamp details 'obscene' $3.2 million bill that caused it to quit the cloud
(2023/01/16)
- Reference: 1673841487
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/01/16/basecamp_37signals_cloud_bill/
- Source link:
David Heinemeier Hansson, CTO of 37Signals – which operates project management platform Basecamp and other products – has detailed the colossal cloud bills that saw the outfit [1]quit the cloud in October 2022.
The CTO and creator of Ruby On Rails did all the sums and came up with an eye-watering [2]cloud bill for $3,201,564 in 2022 – or $266,797 each month.
Most of that spend – $759,983 – went on compute, in the form of Amazon Web Services' EC2 and EKS services.
[3]
On Twitter, Hansson contrasted that cost with the spend needed to acquire servers packing 288 vCPUs and plenty more besides over three years.
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, 15TB NVM, 1.3TB RAM for $1,287/month over 3 years! [4]pic.twitter.com/l1qapdRF6T — DHH (@dhh) [5]January 12, 2023
Hansson was at pains to point out that even that bill was the result of a concerted effort to keep it low.
"Getting this massive spend down to just $3.2 million has taken a ton of work. The ops team runs a vigilant cost-inspection program, with monthly reporting and tracking, and we've entered into long-term agreements on Reserved Instances and committed usage, as part of a Private Pricing Agreement," he wrote. "This is a highly optimized budget."
[6]
[7]
But it's also a budget he thinks could be "dramatically cut" with a move to owned Dell hardware and managed hosting from an outfit called Deft.
[8]The world was promised 'cloud magic'. So much for that fairy tale
[9]75% of databases to be cloud-hosted by 2022, says Gartner while dishing on the weak points of each provider
[10]VC's paper claims cost of cloud is twice as much as running on-premises. Let's have a look at that
[11]AWS Free Tier, where's your spending limit? 'I thought I deleted everything but I have been charged $200'
Hansson revealed that the business's single biggest cloudy line item is $907,837.83 to store over eight petabytes of data in AWS's Simple Storage Service (S3).
"It's worth noting that this setup uses a dual-region replication strategy, so we're resilient against an entire AWS region disappearing, including all the availability zones," he added. He also pointed out that 37Signals spent $66,742 ($5,562/month) on AWS's CloudFront content delivery service to move the data out of the cloud.
The CTO didn't detail how, or if, using less cloud will let 37Signals achieve the same resilience it enjoys in AWS. But he promised to repeat the accounting exercise in public next year, to reveal how the enterprise saves money.
[12]
The Register has already set a reminder to check for this year's bill in early 2024. ®
Get our [13]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/20/basecamp_decamps_from_cloud/
[2] https://dev.37signals.com/our-cloud-spend-in-2022/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Y8TZ9Otm4@qu2G8CFWWhxgAAANY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://t.co/l1qapdRF6T
[5] https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1613558939760689153?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Y8TZ9Otm4@qu2G8CFWWhxgAAANY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Y8TZ9Otm4@qu2G8CFWWhxgAAANY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/02/cloud_magic_era_ends/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/02/gartner_cloud_dbms/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/02/andressen_horowitz_paper/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/28/aws_free_tier/
[12] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Y8TZ9Otm4@qu2G8CFWWhxgAAANY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
The CTO and creator of Ruby On Rails did all the sums and came up with an eye-watering [2]cloud bill for $3,201,564 in 2022 – or $266,797 each month.
Most of that spend – $759,983 – went on compute, in the form of Amazon Web Services' EC2 and EKS services.
[3]
On Twitter, Hansson contrasted that cost with the spend needed to acquire servers packing 288 vCPUs and plenty more besides over three years.
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, 15TB NVM, 1.3TB RAM for $1,287/month over 3 years! [4]pic.twitter.com/l1qapdRF6T — DHH (@dhh) [5]January 12, 2023
Hansson was at pains to point out that even that bill was the result of a concerted effort to keep it low.
"Getting this massive spend down to just $3.2 million has taken a ton of work. The ops team runs a vigilant cost-inspection program, with monthly reporting and tracking, and we've entered into long-term agreements on Reserved Instances and committed usage, as part of a Private Pricing Agreement," he wrote. "This is a highly optimized budget."
[6]
[7]
But it's also a budget he thinks could be "dramatically cut" with a move to owned Dell hardware and managed hosting from an outfit called Deft.
[8]The world was promised 'cloud magic'. So much for that fairy tale
[9]75% of databases to be cloud-hosted by 2022, says Gartner while dishing on the weak points of each provider
[10]VC's paper claims cost of cloud is twice as much as running on-premises. Let's have a look at that
[11]AWS Free Tier, where's your spending limit? 'I thought I deleted everything but I have been charged $200'
Hansson revealed that the business's single biggest cloudy line item is $907,837.83 to store over eight petabytes of data in AWS's Simple Storage Service (S3).
"It's worth noting that this setup uses a dual-region replication strategy, so we're resilient against an entire AWS region disappearing, including all the availability zones," he added. He also pointed out that 37Signals spent $66,742 ($5,562/month) on AWS's CloudFront content delivery service to move the data out of the cloud.
The CTO didn't detail how, or if, using less cloud will let 37Signals achieve the same resilience it enjoys in AWS. But he promised to repeat the accounting exercise in public next year, to reveal how the enterprise saves money.
[12]
The Register has already set a reminder to check for this year's bill in early 2024. ®
Get our [13]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/20/basecamp_decamps_from_cloud/
[2] https://dev.37signals.com/our-cloud-spend-in-2022/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Y8TZ9Otm4@qu2G8CFWWhxgAAANY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://t.co/l1qapdRF6T
[5] https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1613558939760689153?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Y8TZ9Otm4@qu2G8CFWWhxgAAANY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Y8TZ9Otm4@qu2G8CFWWhxgAAANY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/02/cloud_magic_era_ends/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/02/gartner_cloud_dbms/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/02/andressen_horowitz_paper/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/28/aws_free_tier/
[12] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Y8TZ9Otm4@qu2G8CFWWhxgAAANY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: "Most of that spend – $759,983 – went on compute"
Sora2566
When the Reg says "most of that spend", I suspect they meant "the biggest chunk of that spend".
DougMac
And how much is the bill for the electricity, cooling, datacenter infrastructure, security, compliance, local sys admin staff that you also get in the cloud bill?
"Most of that spend – $759,983 – went on compute"
No it didn't.
$760K out of $3+ million is definitely not most of that spend.
Now, 8 petabytes of data is nothing to sneeze at, that's for sure. But, if you have a budget of over $260K/month, you have enough money for servers, a local SAS implementation running over 100Gbps fiber and money to spare for the aircon bill and fire suppressing installation.
Apparently, The Cloud TM does not give you any savings on the IT personnel budget, since there is still need of a bunch of skilled admins to oversee it properly, so you have the people required to manage all that locally.
I'm curious to see next year's local bill and find out just how damning it is for The Cloud TM .