When we published How moving from AWS to Bare-Metal saved us $230,000 /yr. in 2023, the story travelled far beyond our usual readership. The discussion threads on Hacker News and Reddit were packed with sharp questions: did we skip Reserved Instances, how do we fail over a single rack, what about the people cost, and when is cloud still the better answer? This follow-up is our long-form reply.
Over the last twenty-four months we:
Ran the MicroK8s + Ceph stack in production for 730+ days with 99.993% measured availability.
Added a second rack in Frankfurt, joined to our primary Paris cage over redundant DWDM, to kill the “single rack” concern.
Cut average customer-facing latency by 19% thanks to local NVMe and eliminating noisy neighbours.
Reinvested the savings into buying bare metal AI servers to expand LLM-based alert / incident summarisation and auto code fixes based on log / traces and metrics in OneUptime.
Below we tackle the recurring themes from the community feedback, complete with the numbers we use internally.
$230,000 / yr savings? That is just an engineers salary.
In the US, it is. In the rest of the world. That's 2-5x engineers salary. We used to save $230,000 / yr but now the savings have exponentially grown. We now save over $1.2M / yr and we expect this to grow, as we grow as a business.
“Why not just buy Savings Plans or Reserved Instances?”
... continue reading