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Should novice founders ignore the endless debate about server infrastructure? To a certain extent yes: investors we spoke to give entrepreneurs the blessing of not thinking too much about cloud spending in their early days. But the rise of machine learning leads us to suspect that the answers may soon change. — Anna
Bare metal, reworked
If you had some déjà vu this week when David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) announced that Basecamp and Hey parent company 37signals leave the cloudyou’re not alone: the debate about the pros and cons of cloud infrastructure sometimes seems to get stuck in a never-ending loop.
It’s certainly not the first time I’ve heard 37signals’ core argument that “computer renting is (usually) a bad deal for medium-sized companies like ours with stable growth.”
In fact, both the rationale of DHH and the opponents reminded me strongly of the years-long discussion that expense management company Expensify sparked when it defended its choice to start using bare metal — that is, running its own servers.
However, it would be wrong to think that the parameters of the cloud versus on-premise debate have remained unchanged.
As a partner of Boldstart Ventures Shomik Ghosh As noted in our cloud investor survey, there’s more to it than running your own servers these days. Discussion aside, I think most of us would agree that bare metal isn’t for everyone, which is why it’s interesting to see a middle ground emerge.
“In terms of terminology,” Ghosh said, “I think on-prem should also be called ‘modern on-prem’, which is what Replicated came up with, because it covers not only bare-metal self-managed servers, but also virtual private clouds. , etc.”