37signals

History

2024: Ditching Cloud Services

In mid-October 2024, it became known that companies in the United States began to abandon the use of cloud services and return to the local IT infrastructure, which turns out to be cheaper to operate - even taking into account equipment. In particular, this is stated by the American private company 37signals, the creator of the Ruby on Rails framework and the Basecamp project management tool.

According to The Register, 37signals previously actively used cloud services Amazon Web Services (). AWS However, when the bills for paying for these services reached $3,201,564 a year, the company decided to change the model of work. 37signals began to form a local DPC based on Dell servers.

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According to the technical director of 37signals David Heinemeier Hansson, the company purchased Dell equipment worth about $700 thousand to replace cloud instances. Hansson argues that these costs were "fully recouped" during 2023. Seven systems were transferred to the local data center, as a result of which the annual costs of cloud services decreased by almost $2 million - to $1.3 million.

Think about it for a second. This is the [Dell Servers] hardware we expect to use for the next five, maybe even seven years! Everything paid off with savings accumulated in the second half of 2023, "Hansson said.

As of October 2024, 37signals continues to use AWS S3 cloud object storage under a four-year contract that expires in the summer of 2025. After that, the company intends to deploy its own storage with a capacity of 18 PB. Initial equipment costs are expected to be about the same as the annual cost of AWS S3.^[1]

Notes