We stand to save $7M over five years from our cloud exit

I've been saying for years that cloud is more cost but you end up needing the same number of people if you have a large enough scope.

Scalability isn't actually all that hard, you solve it in cloud or you solve it in hardware.

People are always very quick to say that running on bare metal means you have to start working in nuclear power plants or CPU lithography from sand. It's intellectually dishonest of course, but we need new players in the game that can't be accused of being old and actually weighing the benefits and drawbacks publicly. So, Bravo.

I've seen cases where you want to provision the new rack but unfortunately DC is full and you have to end up running infrastructure spanning across different buildings or even different DCs.

With Zen4 I would go with single CPU option, it's hard to saturate 256 threads.

Main cost in the cloud is always the database server, because it needs to be on 100% of the time, cannot be on spot instance, and needs lots of memory and CPU just in case of a spike of traffic.

Hol' up. They're replicating data across regions -- across /several/ regions -- on top of a service (S3) which already has 99.999999999% data durability in a single region? ...Why?

It seems like they won't move their 8PB of data off the cloud. This seems smart because you can always spin up servers when one goes down, but if your storage system loses important user emails, that's the end of your service.