By Welcome to the first edition of Geeker's Cloud Digest, a digest of several cloud related news from the past days and week. This article is based on a summary found on Andreas Lehr's blog allesnurgecloud and other news from the Internet.
Building your own cloud for Basecamp and HEY not as easy as thought
The company 37 Signals, which is behind the collaboration tool "Basecamp" and "HEY", decided to leave the Cloud to save costs. David Heinemeier Hansson (short DHH) wrote about leaving the cloud in October 2022. But now, it turns out, this is not as easy as thought.
DHH initially compared the cloud prices against costs (and Total Cost of Ownership, TCO) of own hardware. With great discounts received from DELL, it was expected that other companies, such as SUSE, would also offer discounted prices compared to the list prices. Compared to a massive 80% discount received from DELL, SUSE on the other hand would have only offered a 3% discount – much more than what was expected.
He also offered a (rare, considering companies barely share financial details) insight on the AWS costs in 2022:
- S3 Storage: $ 907,837.83
- RDS/Databases: $ 473,196.30
- OpenSearch: $ 519,959.60
- Elasticache: $ 123,852.30
- Total sum AWS costs: $ 3,201,564.24
Yes, this is a massive sum and considering that a 4 year commit with instance reservation is in place, "normal" (on demand) AWS users would pay even more. But HEY is still on track to build its own infrastructure/cloud. We'll see with what they come up with.
Cloudflare suspends "unwanted" customers
Cloudflare has been in the news recently for unexpected terminations of services – for certain customers. Especially sites with dynamic contents or APIs were targeted and when contacted by the affected customers, Cloudflare responded, mentioning the terms:
Unless explicitly included as part of a Paid Service purchased by you, you agree to use the Services solely for the purpose of (i) serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other functionally equivalent applications, including rendering Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or other functional equivalents, and (ii) serving web APIs subject to the restrictions set forth in this Section
Developer reduced AWS costs by 90% and then disappeared
A developer has succeeded doing the impossible: Reducing the AWS costs by 90%! Shortly after this, the individual disappeared and was not reachable anymore by the (former) employer. A few months later, the costs suddenly increased to the normal value again. What happened?
The developer had changed the input of the processing data. Instead of using the production AWS account, the mischievous developer used a GCS (Google Cloud) trial account. But the individual did not just create one trial account – a massive amount of roughly 1 million trial account were created and used one after another, until they expired. Once they expired, the fallback (using the production AWS account) was used again.
The developer received $ 50,000 for this work.
Big layoffs at big tech companies
Bad news for a lot of employees of the Big Tech companies, as Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta and other tech companies have already or are in the progress of laying off thousands of employees.
Even though Big Tech makes an astounding amount of money, especially AWS Cloud owner Amazon, the companies decided to cut thousands of jobs due to a bad outlook of the economy in 2023. Amazon announced to cut 18,000 jobs, Meta (Facebook) already announced 11,000 layoffs in November 2022, Twitter (after the Elon Musk Twitter takeover) also already cut almost 4,000 jobs. Today Google joined and announced to lay off 12,000 employees.
But also the Crypto Tech companies are sacking employees: Crypto.com announced to fire 500 jobs, Coinbase will even remove 2,000 positions. And to "join the club", other big Tech brands have announced layoffs: Lyft (700), Stripe (1,100), Shopify (1,000), Netflix (450), Snap (1,000), Tesla (6,000) and Salesforce (7,000).
This is a massive amount of job losses all over the tech industry and will likely have a large effect on other industry sectors.
Microsoft announced to do this over a period of the next 3 months but Microsoft employees doubt that this is a good decision, with a potential layoff looming over the heads.
