X celebrates 60% savings from cloud exit | Hacker News Reader

X celebrates 60% savings from cloud exit

world.hey.com

41 pointssoheilpro18 comments

> Not only has the site stayed up

For some regions and values of "up". Let's not forget the temporary extreme rate limits, the day outage in Australia, the 2fa failures in multiple regions, the week of stuck/repeating timelines, the "something went wrong" pages, and a few smaller issues.

> Have you run your numbers?

Yes, finally. This has nothing to do with cloud, you may have a chance for some infra savings, moving whichever way makes sense for you. Run the numbers periodically. "#CloudExit" is dumb.

How much of the savings has also been a result of users leaving the platform?

Although most of Musk's cost savings have been as surgically-precise as Leatherface with DTs, Twitter did ink a very bad fixed-cost contract with GCP that left them with a lot of unused cloud capacity that was being overpaid for. Shutting down a data center likely left them with a lot of capitalized equipment that they could move GCP-hosted data processing to, and Musk isn't shy about exiting contracts, regardless of what the termination clauses might say.

In other words, a lot of these savings probably don't come from actual technical efficiencies, just getting out of a bad contracting situation and making use of a lot of already-acquired hardware.

(It's also likely that X/itter isn't in a position to make use of the kind of reporting and analytics infrastructure Twitter demanded, so they likely aren't losing much, business process-wise, in shutting that down.)

This is a bit pessimistic, the X, formerly twitter, team deserves kudos for such a huge efficiency improvement with a quarter of the previous staffing.

I'm not disputing the efficiency improvements, and it's not pessimistic. It's what happened. There's a few people recently commenting how there were no issues post takeover and how Elon made Twitter profitable and... no, neither of those is true.

How does this relate to the prior comment? Why does some random person elsewhere opining on whether 'there were no issues post takeover' or 'Elon made Twitter profitable' matter ?

Regardless of your opinion on Musk, I can assure you owning your own hardware is worth it.

I still don't think the dot-com boom craze of owning your entire datacenter is a good investment, unless you rent out your excess space and fill it to the top.

Colocation is, however, dirt cheap compared to cloud bills.

Unless you need that burstable capacity. Company I worked for got a 90 minutes heads up that our client bought a Super Bowl ad. We needed to spin up as many instances as possible. The next day, they were gone. Since then, I've been convinced that there is a use case for the cloud for customer facing businesses that have irregular levels of demand.

Burstable loads are the slam-dunk use case for cloud, but I'm highly skeptical of most others.

Totally agree. That is literally the _only_ acceptable use for in fact. So the other 364 days... hybrid cloud

No, they are spending 60% less on cloud and doing the same work locally for an unspecified cost.

And they (and DHH) apparently think accounting for that cost (even in a vague and prelimary manner) is not important when describing their achievements.

DHH is on a crusade to tank the cloud.

ironic considering the bloat of rails probably did more to increase cloud spend than anything else in the last 20 years…

In DHH's post about leaving the cloud he goes through the costs of switching from cloud to on-prem.

https://world.hey.com/dhh/we-stand-to-save-7m-over-five-year...

>And however you're aligned, you'll find a chart to support your position that X is either thriving or has one foot in the grave. So let's not even get into that.

X isn't thriving. It's struggling. It's hurting in revenue and is one of the largest drivers of misinformation on the internet.

It has always been one of the largest drivers of misinformation on the internet. They just didn't care until Elon took over.

It's gotten much worse. Elon fired the moderation team. Now it's a major source of misinformation for racism, anti-semitism, etc.

Nothing's ever perfect, there was misinformation before, but it's accelerated massively after Elon took over.

DHH is insane

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