Cloud spending hit $107 billion in Q3 2025, according to Synergy Research Group data. AWS around 29%, Azure 20%, and Google Cloud 13%.
Sure, they offer exceptional tech and service, right?
Well, let's take an orchestrator like Apache Airflow (no exception): it'll easily set you back €300+/month, whereas a comparable setup on self-hosted hardware (e.g., a VPS) can be €5/month. 2x I get it, 5x maybe, 10x that's greedy-but 100x more?
Self-hosting!
@drbusysloth twitter inc always self hosted everything. i managed several apache airflow orchestrations
@hipsterelectron Hosting at Twitter scale is absolutely massive, props 😉
Honestly, even well below Twitter scale, self-hosting these packages is still quite complicated. Wouldn’t it be nice if it were as easy as “press a button and here you go with a solid, production-ready setup”?
For huge orgs that won't work, I get it. But for smaller teams and indie devs, it really should. Esp. when you consider that Airflow is just one service in a whole production suite: MLflow, Kafka, vector DBs, aso 🦥
@drbusysloth that is exactly the kind of thing we were building with pants https://pantsbuild.org unfortunately google convinced twitter to stop funding it
@hipsterelectron Awesome! I definitely gonna give it a try 😀
My project (mlox.org) comes from a different angle: specialized, opinionated, and hands-off. Less "build your own world" and more "these are the 3 things you can do, it should just work". Also very early days compared to something as mature as Pantsbuild.
I actually think both approaches make sense together: I have a small pilot where MLOX CLI is used from the build system to deploy models. Still a tad clumsy, but promising 🙂
@drbusysloth these monopolists are vicious
