David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

We then had a long multi-year commitment to S3 because the only way to get decent pricing in the cloud, by the way, is not to buy...

on a day-to-day basis, not to rent on a database basis, but to bind yourself up to multi-year contracts.

With compute, it's often a year.

That was in our case.

And with storage, it was four years.

We signed a four-year contract to store our petabytes of customer files in the cloud to be able to get something just halfway decent affordable.

So, all of these projects came together to the sense that we're now saving literally millions of dollars projected about 10 million over five years.

It's always hard.

How do you do the accounting exactly and TOC this, that, and the other thing, but it's millions of dollars.

But it's not just that.

It's also the fact that getting out of the cloud meant returning to more of an original idea of the Internet, that the Internet was not designed such that three computers should run everything.

It was a distributed network such that the individual nodes could disappear and the whole thing would still carry on.

DARPA designed this such that the Russians could take out Washington and they could still fight back from New York.

that the entire communication infrastructure wouldn't disappear because there was no hub and spoke.

It was a network.

I always found that an immensely beautiful vision, that you could have this glorious internet and no single node was in control of everything.

And we've returned to much more of a single node controlling everything idea with these hyperscalers.

When US East 1, the main and original region for AWS goes offline, which has happened more than a few times over the years, seemingly a third of the internet is offline.

Like that in itself is just an insult to DARPA's design.

detract from the fact that what AWS built was marvelous.