I'm always curious what RoI analysis goes into this kind of decision - whether to leave on-prem and join the cloud, or vice versa. The numbers always seem huge, and in opposite directions. "Moving from onsite datacenters to AWS saved us $2m/year!"

Has something changed with AWS' pricing recently, have their business needs changed over the years, or were the calculations (to use AWS) just wrong to begin with?

The cloud always seemed foolish to me. A company's computers and the data they contain are one of its most critical resources. For an IT company it's everything. To put that anywhere other than one's own secured datacenter is crazy. I'm a firm believer in "If you don't hold it, you don't own it." Also: "Two is one, and one is none."

Companies might complain that they can't find the talent to manage all this. Well then they need to hire some bright teenagers and teach them instead of expecting to get the perfect plug and play candidate. Those employees will be more loyal over the long term for a variety of reasons. But the owners don't care about providing for the future, only this quarter's sales.

Companies should invest in their own computing infrastructure even if it costs more, just so they can continue doing business as usual while the rest of the world's hair is on fire about the latest Windows rootkit or Microsoft/Github/AWS outage or whatever.

These decisions always depend on the lifecycle of the product. I assume that at Basecamp’s level of maturity, where it has reached a certain saturation point and growth and usage are fairly predictable, it makes perfect sense to make a strategic decision like this and commit to a long-term bet.

Regardless, kudos to DHH and team for being so vocal about it, it's a great case study for product teams in similar lifecycle.

(2023)

Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38644550