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Shreyas Iyer

On-Prem or the Cloud?

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Recently there’s been a ton of discussion after Basecamp announced that they’re moving off of AWS in favor of on-prem. Yesterday, DHH followed up with a blog post on the process (https://world.hey.com/dhh/cloud-...). What do you think, and what do you prefer?

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Bruno Novais
On-premises has many different layers that people usually forget. Location and engineering are probably the most relevant ones, even more than computers. How good is the security and network connectivity of the location you chose? How good or expensive are the engineers you’re hiring to be available 24/7? I think in most cases cloud makes more sense, especially for startups. If you choose the right programming language and spend some time planning a good software architecture, you can save a few dollars. Regardless of that, you can always use Antimetal to help you save more. However, I really like on-prem and find it much more fun to work with.
Navin Peiris
It makes sense to me once you’ve got an established product and have a good sense of what your hardware requirements are, and you’re willing to put in the effort of managing the physical infrastructure. Hard to justify it for a startup/scale up in my opinion. Wouldn’t want to give up the flexibility of being able to change your infrastructure needs at the click of a button and wouldn’t want to take on the additional burden of managing physical devices and network etc. Saying that, I’m a big fan of what they’ve done with mrsk, and will be ditching ECS/K8S and deploying to DigitalOcean using it for my current product.
Shreyas Iyer
@navinpeiris completely agree here. In Basecamp's case, they have a much more established product, and more importantly much more established infrastructure requirements. They know *pretty much* what they require, and for that reason, the switch probably made a lot of sense in terms of cost. That being said, this is not the average case. Most people on the cloud are there precisely for the reason that it's flexible, and you aren't committing to any upfront cost. On top of that, DevOps is hard enough on the cloud. Can't imagine having to manage servers and infra from day 1. I'm glad you've found a good solution with mrsk and DigitalOcean. Would love to hear how this works for you!
Preston Button
It's hard for me to overlook the scaleability and simplicity of AWS and Azure. While moving on-prem obviously has its perks, it's not enough to make me want to switch from the cloud
Krishna Kumar
On prem is not for smaller setups. You need to be a certian size to be able to afford that additional effort and bandwidth. At the same time, AWS/GCP/Azure are the costlier cloud options. For people looking to avoid the hassles of hardware and middleware management, but need cheaper cloud based deployment, there are many options out there that can meet your needs.