“We Stand to save $7m over 5 Years from Our Cloud Exit”, 2023-02-21 (; backlinks):
Since declaring our intention to leave the cloud in October, we’ve been busy at work making it so.
…So that leaves ~$2.3m on everything else: app servers, cache servers, database servers, search servers, the works. That’s the part of the budget we intend to bring to zero in 2023. Then we’ll worry about exiting the 8PB from S3 in 2024.
After much deliberation, many benchmarks, and much awing at the speed of AMD’s new Zen 4 chips combined with Gen 4 NVMe drives, we’re almost ready to place our monster order with Dell. Somewhere in the region of $600,000. We’re still fine-tuning exactly what configurations we need, but whether we end up ordering 8 machines running dual 64-core CPUs (for a total of 256 vCPUs per box!) in each data center or 14 machines running single-core CPUs at a higher clock frequency doesn’t really matter to the overall math. We need to add about 2,000 vCPU per data center, and we run in two data centers, so 4,000 vCPUs for performance and redundancy. All rough numbers.
…That’s a total of $840,000/year for everything. Bandwidth, power, and boxes on an amortization schedule of 5 years. Compared to $2.3m in the cloud. And we’ll have much faster hardware, many more cores, incredibly cheaper NVMe storage, and room to expand at a very low cost (as long as we can still fit in two racks per data center).
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