David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

But way too many people overestimated the value of that speed.

If you need a thousand computers online in the next 15 minutes, nothing beats the cloud.

How would you even procure that?

If we just need another 20 servers, it's going to take a week or two to get boxes shipped on pallets, delivered to a data center and unwrapped and racked and all that stuff, right?

But how often do we need to do that?

And how often do we need to do that if buying those servers is way, way cheaper?

So we get vastly more compute for the same amount of money.

Could we just buy more servers and not even care about the fact that we're not hyper-optimized on the compute utility?

That we don't have to use things like automatic scaling to figure things out because we have to reduce costs?

Yes, we can.

So we went through this journey over...

A realization in early 2023, when I had finally had enough with our bills, I wanted to get rid of them.

I wanted to spend less money.

I wanted to keep more of the money ourselves.

And in just over six months, we moved seven major applications out of the cloud in terms of compute, caching, databases, the works onto our own servers, a glorious, beautiful new fleet bought from the king of servers, Michael Dell, who...

Really, by the way, he's another icon of mine.

I saw he just celebrated 41 years in business.

41 years this man has been selling awesome servers that we've been using for our entire existence.

But anyway, these palettes arrive in a couple of weeks and we rack them up and get everything going.

And we were out, at least with the compute part.