Thank you for visiting! I started blogging 15 years ago as a hobby, inspired by my passion for technological innovation. Over the years, I’ve explored various technology domains, with a strong focus on Digital, Data & AI and Cloud Transformation, alongside a keen interest in Indian regional politics.
Recently, I’ve begun curating and sharing insightful links and analysis on these topics. I hope you find them informative and engaging. Happy reading!
The hardware we need for our cloud exit has arrived
It's been a long time since I last saw a physical piece of hardware used to run our services at 37signals. I vaguely remember doing a tour of our Chicago data center over a decade ago, but somewhere along the line, I just lost interest in the iron itself. Now the interest is back, because hardware is fun again, so let me share my excitement with you!
These are the two pallets that showed up in our Chicago data center recently. The same day that an identical set arrived in Ashburn, Virginia for our second data center. In total, we received twenty R7625 Dell servers that'll power the bulk of our cloud exit. It's a staggering amount of computing power in a shockingly small footprint.
Here's a diagram of our four cabinets in Chicago (we have another four in Ashburn). As you can tell, there's still a bunch of older hardware dedicated to Basecamp in particular. A good chunk of that will actually get retired, once we're done setting things up. But all the 2U servers marked "kvm" at the bottom of the cabinets are the new ones:
You can spot the new R7625s at the bottom of the actual racks here, next to the older gear:
Each of these R7625s contain two AMD EPYC 9454 CPUs running at 2.75GHz with 48 cores / 96 threads. That means we're adding almost 4,000 vCPUs to our on-premise fleet! And a ridiculous 7,680 GB of RAM! And 384TB of Gen 4 NVMe storage! Serious horsepower and headroom for years to come. In addition to this, we have another ~six database servers showing up between now and this summer, and then we'll be set.
The contrast to the origin of Basecamp is funny. We launched Basecamp on a single-core Celeron server with just 256MB of RAM back in 2004. Spinning rust at 7,200 RPM. And that was good enough to get the business from part-time to full-time in about a year.
Almost twenty years later, we now have a long lineage of legacy applications (because we promise to keep applications customers depend on running until the end of the internet!), some massive flagship services in Basecamp and HEY, and a mission to get it all running on hardware we own ourselves again.
It's kinda wild to think that it's been less than three months since we decided to scrap Kubernetes and pursue a simpler solution for the cloud exit with MRSK. And that we've already moved half of the cloud applications that need to come home!
Over the next month or so, we plan to bring home both Basecamp Classic (still a multi-million dollar business, even if it hasn't been updated in about 13 years – that SaaS magic!), as well as the grand prize of the cloud exit: HEY! That'll leave us with just Highrise and a small auxiliary service called Portfolio left in the cloud as we start the month of May.
I thought we were already being optimistic when we planned a total cloud exit by the end of summer, but now it seems we'll basically be done by the end of spring instead. Truly a remarkable achievement by the team working on this effort.
The reality of our accelerated timeline has made me even more bullish on cloud exits in general. I imagined getting out of the cloud was going to be as hard as getting in. But that just hasn't proven to be the case. Though perhaps it's helped that we've had that nuts number of $38,000/week in cloud spend as a motivating carrot to get it done quickly!
I seriously hope that other SaaS entrepreneurs looking at their daunting cloud bills are paying attention. Once you've gone cloud, it might seem impossible to contemplate getting out again, but don't believe that for a second.
Modern server hardware is incredible. We've taken huge leaps forward in performance, density, and cost over the last few years. If you haven't run the numbers since cloud became the default in the past decade, you really ought to do so now. The numbers might just shock you as much as they did us.
So the end is now clearly in sight. We've solved all the key technical challenges we needed to address to make the cloud exit happen. We've been running production apps on MRSK for a while now. The path is clear, and I can't wait for those mammoth cloud bills evaporate. I think we're going to find that the napkin math I did for our public calculation of savings will be highly conservative. But we'll see and we'll share.
Broadcom is committed to a robust partner ecosystem.
In the years that I have led Broadcom, I have found two things to be true for technology leaders: First, success with your customers starts with success with your ecosystem partners; and second, driving ecosystem growth is key to maintaining the growth of your own business.
This is why, at Broadcom, we bring innovation, investment and attention into our making customer value a lasting reality through our pioneering partner programs. These programs help us drive two pivotal customer objectives: innovation in technology and innovation in business models.
From joint innovation to accessing new markets, our pioneering partner programs help us do more for customers. As digital transformation accelerates, customers need fully integrated solutions that address their needs.
Today, we have more than 35,000 partners in our IT infrastructure and cybersecurity software ecosystem, and every single one plays a vital role in bringing value and success for our customers. We work with many kinds of partners across the entire value chain – including the production, procurement, distribution and deployment of our products. They help us expand the reach of our technology and drive better business efficiency and experiences for customers.
When we set out to make any business decision, we always ask ourselves the following three questions:
Does it drive a better outcome for the customer?
Does it allow and enable profitability for a partner?
Does it drive better efficiencies for Broadcom?
If the answer to any of these is “no”, it’s not a path worth pursuing. Our partners and customers should always benefit from the decisions we make.
What partners bring to Broadcom’s customers
At Broadcom, we understand that the key to growth isn’t found in being all things to all people, but instead we believe our customer-first mindset, coupled with purposeful partnerships, is key to delivering untapped value for customers.
Broadcom’s innovative and industry-first partnership models provide that purposeful plan for how our partners integrate into the overall value chain, and empower each company to leverage their core competencies and do what they do best. Our highly capable partners help us provide solutions for customers ranging from the world’s largest public and private organizations to small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Through Broadcom’s unique friction free Expert Advantage Partner Program, partners deliver high value services to customers of all sizes – including our largest enterprise accounts.
Yet, the value our partners deliver goes far beyond services. Showcased on our Insights Marketplace at expert.broadcom.com, customers can find our partner-built applications that extend our product capabilities and tailor them for specific use cases – unlocking more value from our customers’ investments. In short, for every challenge, there’s a Broadcom partner ready to deliver the solution and support the specialized needs of businesses – regardless of size.
What Broadcom brings to partners
At Broadcom, we are unique in how we engage with and support our partner ecosystem. Often, commercial vendors will attempt to control how their partners conduct business. But at Broadcom, we empower partners to identify and pursue their own commercial strategies, so they can bring sales and services to end-user customers on their own terms. We introduce industry-first, go-to-market partner models with shared risk and significant rewards.
Our Global Cyber Security Aggregator Program (CSAP) is proof. CSAP was launched to expand our market reach and deliver enhanced levels of service to a subset of commercial enterprises with unique needs. The program brings together Broadcom’s Symantec cyber security solutions and partners’ resources along with their in-country expertise to offer a best-in-class customer experience. We have made significant investments, including in-sales training to ensure our distribution partners are well equipped to provide better customer support and a quicker response time to evolving threats.
Our customers can also receive hands-on technical help through our unique Broadcom Software Knights Program. We vet and provide certified partners with ongoing technical training, product presale and sales intelligence so that they can handle any complex issue put in front of them with hands-on technical support. We provide them with the best so that our customers experience the best.
Together, we have a shared goal and responsibility of addressing our customers’ needs and delivering superior outcomes. It’s a win-win-win. Our message to our customers, current partners and future partners is this: our goal is to deliver superior outcomes for customers of all sizes; and our partners’ success is our success. We understand the value our partner ecosystem brings to Broadcom and mutual customers, and we are committed to our partner and customers’ continued success.
As per the economic times, “The worldwide public cloud services market represents its growth by 17.3 percent in 2019 to total $206.2 billion, up from $175.8 billion in 2018, as Gartner forecasted that the market will grow 21 percent, up from $145.3 billion in 2017.” All these trends project steady growth in the number of enterprises that are migrating their applications, data, and other essential business elements to the cloud.
So basically, the cloud migration is the process wherein the companies shift their application, data, and other business elements from one premise environment to the cloud environment. Or we can say it is the process of moving the applications to one cloud platform or vendor to another.
Many large-scale enterprises and businesses shift their application and essential data Wles to the cloud to avoid the need to build and maintain the on-premise infrastructure. Additionally, there are many benefits to the companies and businesses on why they need to move to the cloud. So for instance, they don’t need to wastetheir time scaling server resources. It further assists the businesses in the reduction of capital investment as well as operational cost by leveraging computing resources over the internet based on pay-as-you-use pricing models.
Hence, we can say that cloud-based solutions are budget-friendly as well, apart from providing benefits in terms of flexibility, scalability, availability, accessibility, and security. But, probably moving to a cloud from the existing on-premise environment can be a hassle in terms of moving parts that go into the cloud migration, facing the downtime issues, team’s struggle from where to start, and more. However, now they no longer need to worry about these problems as the cloud-migration tools are here to the rescue.
The list below includes tools of the top cloud migration tools and for this particular list, we have focused on software and cloud services that would automate the process of cloud migration.
