We have left the cloud

Our stack for bringing home all these applications is entirely open source. We use KVM to slice our new monster 192-thread Dell R7625s into isolated VMs, then Docker to run the containerized applications, and finally Kamal to do zero-downtime app deploys and rollbacks. This setup helped us dodge the complexity of Kubernetes, and avoid any sort of enterprisey service contract entanglements.

The back of the napkin math is that we'll save at least $1.5 million per year by owning our own hardware rather than renting it from Amazon. And crucially, we've been able to do this without changing the size of the operations team at all. Running our applications in the cloud just never provided the promised productivity gains to do with any smaller of a team anyway.

The main difference here is the lag time between needing new servers and seeing them online. It truly is incredible that you can spin up 100 powerful machines in the cloud in just a few minutes, but you also pay dearly for the privilege. And we just don't have such an unpredictable business as to warrant this premium. Given how much money we're saving owning our own hardware, we can afford to dramatically over-provision our server needs, and then when we need more, it still only takes a couple of weeks to show up.