Euro-cloud provider Anexia moves 12,000 VMs off VMware to homebrew KVM platform

1/13/2025 at 4:32:46 PM

I found this rather odd:

> “We used to pay for VMware software one month in arrears,” he said. “With Broadcom we had to pay a year in advance with a two-year contract.”

If your goal is to extract every possible cent from your existing customers, why would you also switch them from net 30 to requiring partial prepayment? VMware wants money in general but should not have a cash flow problem, and forcing a monster early payment seems like it will force customers to notice an immediate problem and make a choice instead of allowing themselves to be slowly and steadily ripped off.

If I were a pointy-haired CEO committed to the multiply-pricing-by-five strategy, I would do my best to sweeten the deal: offer generous payment terms, give nice-sounding discounts for up front commitments, give very large discounts for nodes that haven’t yet been leased to a customer, etc.

by amluto

1/13/2025 at 4:43:44 PM

Because they have twelve thousands vms and are themselves a provider that can't afford to have downtime for its customers.

So the thinking here was probably "there is no way they can refuse to sign right now and destroy their business in the process, so we might as well take the cake and also force them to stay after so they don't leave in 11 months and 29 days".

Turns out that thinking is wrong for that specific customers, but for how many did it work ?

by nolok

1/13/2025 at 11:08:08 PM

The large renewal "uplift" is partly a strategy to get in front of the C levels and board of directors.

I heard of a one billion dollar renewal quote from Broadcom. The company didn't pay anything close to that. But it bypassed middle mgmt... Not exactly sure what the overall strategy is here, but this is not an isolated incident.

by pixelcloud

1/14/2025 at 8:32:26 AM

The strategy is Broadcom doesn’t give a flying F about any customer smaller than Fortune 50. They really don’t. Hock has said as much.

by Texasian

1/14/2025 at 4:17:56 AM

My guess is that lower/middle management would have greater hatred of Broadcom…

Upper management will be the clueless putz.

by BobbyTables2

1/13/2025 at 8:08:18 PM

Here’s an alternative theory - and I have no idea if it is right. But, this might have happened this way because Anexia only have 12,000 VMs and Broadcom wanted to get rid of the account. I don’t know if Anexia was considered a large or mid-level customer for VMware. As other have mentioned here… there are other customers who have many more VMs on site.

by mbreese

1/13/2025 at 8:30:57 PM

I think the original theory is right. I’ve seen it play out close up. Basically a sales guy thinks they have a client who is caught and they can basically can extort them for a ransome and they try to do it. Sometimes clients actually are not as caught as the sales guys think and this happens. The sales guy looks now like an idiot and this is a guide that other caught customers can follow.

by bhouston

1/13/2025 at 5:12:21 PM

Indeed, a sales rep might have dreamed of an extra big bonus.

by tgv

1/13/2025 at 9:39:42 PM

My cousin is a VMware sales girl. She didn't like the Broadcom move at all. Customers are exiting right and left. And no new contracts at all. Game over

by rurban

1/13/2025 at 7:08:30 PM

That's not sales it's extortion

by rkagerer

1/13/2025 at 7:37:26 PM

VMware was taken over by a company whose business model is extortion. Ie take over a company with customer that have few or little alternatives then keep jacking up prices as high as they can.

by xbmcuser

1/13/2025 at 9:14:00 PM

The company I work for experienced this. The SaaS solution we depended on suddenly got very pricey. New pricing model and all. The sales reps were completely inflexible. It got so uncomfortable that I got to develop a replacement. When we were (gradually) moving over, they lost interest and let us off with a mild increase, and from this year on, we won’t be needing them at all.

by tgv

1/14/2025 at 12:05:27 AM

Buy, or build?

Build -> opportunity cost, ongoing cost, legacy

Buy -> upfront cost, integrate, ongoing cost, and maybe eventually extortion leading you to Build a replacement.

This leads to many different implementations of roughly the same concepts all over, which sucks. Or open source, if it already exists. Or both. Not that open source doesn't have integration costs.

But think of this from an executive's perspective. Building really sucks. But buying sucks more in the future. You might just buy.

I've seen all of these. My preference is to grudgingly build if suitable open source doesn't already exist.

by cryptonector

1/13/2025 at 7:50:45 PM

No it’s “vendor lock-in”

Wait no you’re right, they are practically synonyms.

by malux85

1/13/2025 at 8:53:35 PM

For the sales guys involved it looked like a massive payday for him, one he could brag about for years.

by bhouston

1/13/2025 at 9:48:23 PM

The guy's name is "Hock Tan", it goes all the way to the top. Greedy billionaire trying to squeeze the entire on-prem datacenter industry. Every single one of my VMware customers is either in the process of migrating off or developing the plan to do so. At least one of them would be in Broadcom's list of 600 key accounts that Broadcom thought they could turn the screws on. They somehow seem to have forgotten that MS had just bought a chunk of that org and instead of paying VMware, they are now exiting a few dozen datacenters to move everything to the cloud. This org was highly cloud-resistant (for a handful of good reasons), but VMware forced their hand at exactly the wrong time.

I believe this course of action for VMware is going to be taught in business schools in the future.

by luma

1/13/2025 at 10:29:36 PM

The story is even worst than this. You can find an interview from him on YouTube post acquisition of VMWare. A business reporter naively ask him what is his strategy for the acquisition. The answer just shows there was no strategy, just, and I am paraphrasing: "I spent all this money has to be for something"

by belter

1/14/2025 at 12:12:47 AM

Do any business schools teach about business school fads and how often they don't work out?

by cryptonector

1/13/2025 at 9:08:22 PM

I still don't know.

Starving the milk cows (push customers into losses) is never a smart strategy for those living on milk cows. Sounds more like inceadibly stupid. Or short sighted parasitic (squeeze all then run with the heist).

by mihaaly

1/13/2025 at 11:59:57 PM

It's the FYB point[0], apparently.

[0] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2004/08/28/the-economics-of-sof...

by cryptonector

1/14/2025 at 3:48:16 AM

> So the thinking here was probably "there is no way they can refuse to sign right now and destroy their business in the process, so we might as well take the cake and also force them to stay after so they don't leave in 11 months and 29 days".

Maybe. However, Broadcom has been bending people over the barrel for VMWare for a while now. Anyone who doesn't have a migration plan in the works at this point is an utter fool.

Turning the screws 12 months ago? Sure, probably gonna work. Now? Not so much.

by bsder

1/14/2025 at 7:12:26 AM

Payment in advance is particularly silly, I assume some stayed, additions fell off a cliff and not enough will be paying for the next quarters to not look like a disaster for them as ones that maybe could leave see their desperation and start setting terms.

by snailmailstare

1/13/2025 at 4:55:00 PM

In my experience, VMWare attempts to force this model on everyone using tactics like not giving quotes until the very last minute, forcing buyers into a "take it or leave it" decision.. thinking (rightly so) that it will work in their favor most of the time.

It takes a lot of balls for a company to "leave it" right as their contract is expiring, and speaks to talent and experience on the customer side to be able to stand up to bullying, and be able to pull off such a large migration.

by ratg13

1/13/2025 at 5:23:46 PM

But it's also a great negotiating tactic for the buyer not the seller. This seller has been chasing this buyer for however much time, and then at the last second walks away from the deal. I've had the price of a car drop drastically by doing this. I can't imagine a software sales person and its managers not budging and just letting the deal walk away either.

by dylan604

1/13/2025 at 8:54:00 PM

But it's highly unlikely the buyer will walk away if their core business already depends on the product you licensed to them

by hdhdbebd

1/14/2025 at 4:00:40 AM

Now that there's a high profile example of it happening, though, it might become both more common and more of a negotiation tool for customers. This company has shown that it can be done, and now both Broadcomm and their customers know it, and each knows that the other knows it.

Sure, it's still a lot of effort, but, at this point, even if Broadcomm can get somebody to sign up for another year, that gives the customer a year to plan on how to jump ship next time around. And it looks like the number of people with expertise on migrating from VMWare is skyrocketing, so companies should be able to hire a team to do it...

by protimewaster

1/13/2025 at 5:49:29 PM

I had my license cost from another large company YoY increase 10x (hefty amount). Reason was new sales manager who wanted to shake max money. They make revenue and then move on.

by KingOfCoders

1/13/2025 at 5:45:36 PM

The lock in is strong with their product and they know it. Migrating hypervisors is a long and arduous process for any medium-to-small business, and I speak from experience: it took our small team about 2 months to move off of VMware about a decade ago, also because the price of support was simply unhinged from our perspective.

They would be fools to not expect high attrition of smaller clients, but big businesses and government customers aren't going to change, or at least not nearly to the tune that smaller ones would, and a smaller pool of larger customers paying a higher price probably works pretty well to keep revenues up while letting them slash support staff without too much of a reduction in quality for those that are left.

It was clear to me from the beginning that this price hike wasn't about cash flow, not particularly. Broadcom doesn't want vmware wasting money supporting small fish.

by ToucanLoucan

1/13/2025 at 4:38:27 PM

Perhaps similar strategy as spammers employ today? Where they try to filter away people quickly who wouldn't fall for it when they need it to.

So do something slightly outrageous today, so you filter away the ones that won't stick around for the future more outrageous changes.

by diggan

1/13/2025 at 4:38:23 PM

Either their sales team absolutely screwed this up, or they just don't want to bother with the VMware platform anymore. Maybe both?

by shepardrtc

1/13/2025 at 8:08:45 PM

Broadcom aspires to the Oracle model, they said as much when they bought VMware.

by nyrikki

1/13/2025 at 3:54:09 PM

I definitely don't want to miniminize the significance of this. This is huge!

But, they did have some major benefits that most companies looking to do the same won't:

> Anexia therefore resolved to migrate, a choice made easier by its ownership of another hosting business called Netcup that ran on a KVM-based platform.

> The hosting company is also a big user of NetApp storage, so customer data was already stored in a resource independent of its VMware rig – any new VMs would just need to be pointed at existing volumes.

Again, still a great accomplishment and an exciting milestone for them, but for people still stuck on VMWare that are looking to migrate, it's good to know about the above things.

by freedomben

1/13/2025 at 4:28:03 PM

Other than the additional capital outlay, this shouldn't prove a hurdle to anyone looking to do similar. Migrating from VSAN to external storage like NetApp is a non-disruptive process. And frankly VSAN has always been pretty horrible, so you'll likely end up with better performance and storage efficiency when all is said and done.

by tw04

1/13/2025 at 5:41:04 PM

The phrase "homebrew KVM platform" made me chuckle. All of the hyperscalers have a homebrew, aka proprietary platform using a hypervisor. AWS has Nitro which seems to have been based on KVM but likely quite different by now.

If you are selling VMs to customers, I can't understand a good reason to use VMWare. The only reason would be if you are selling VMWare as a service.

by rcleveng

1/13/2025 at 5:45:05 PM

> AWS has Nitro which seems to have been based on KVM but likely quite different by now.

It still is relatively stock KVM on the CPU side of things. They've been upstreaming changes they need like lower overhead for emulating Xen's hypercall interface.

Most of their special sauce is in the devices though, as those natively provide VM boundaries leaving the hypervisor to not have to manage all that much at runtime.

by monocasa

1/13/2025 at 8:13:44 PM

The challenging bits are all outside of the KVM like the VPC networking that has to be implemented using some SDN (e.g OpenVSwitch), block devices, etc

VMware had a solution for all of these natively and with support. Not using their hypervisors you have to manage a huge pile of OSS+proprietary integrations and actually have staff who truly understand how everything works down to the lowest level. Doable but probably above the pay grade for most

by dilyevsky

1/14/2025 at 10:23:52 AM

> VMware had a solution for all of these natively and with support

VMware support had always been a crapshoot. Now under Broadcom it's even worse.

So having support that may or may not be useless isn't a big advantage, really.

Not everyone needs an SDN, depending on their networking requirements or topology. Storage is also not a very complicated problem if you already have a SAN. Solutions like Proxmox come with everything included too, so you don't have to build everything from scratch.

by sofixa

1/13/2025 at 5:43:41 PM

If you’re providing application services to customers who need to use an application that the vendor only supports in VMware, then you don’t have a choice.

Well, I suppose you do. But an EMR/EHR for instance is going to _need_ vendor support, which means requiring VMware even if you’re not selling VMware itself as a service.

by TheNewsIsHere

1/13/2025 at 11:56:21 PM

Absolutely - in enterprise software, it's the certified configurations that are not something you can mess around with, if you like support.

I'd still consider this VMware as a service, although not full VMware, but just enough for the checkboxes. Maybe you don't get API access, console access, etc, but the main thing you are selling is vmware (to check the certification boxes), and not a generic VM.

by rcleveng

1/13/2025 at 5:19:16 PM

Anybody who formalizes their "homebrew KVM platform" into a marketable hypervisor product is going to make a lot of money I suspect. Every IT department I know is scrambling to replace their VMWare stack ASAP, including very large ones.

by segasaturn

1/13/2025 at 5:51:37 PM

Most things that would have used VMware 15 years ago are using Kubernetes now. The things that aren't are probably looking at Proxmox or just KVM.

by dehrmann

1/16/2025 at 5:09:38 PM

>VMware 15 years ago are using Kubernetes now.

this doesn't sound right, both serve different purposes

by taskforcegemini

1/14/2025 at 5:50:23 AM

As rwmj says in this thread, there are already several mature KVM-based solutions that you can run yourself, if you have the staff who can manage it.

Disclosure: I also work in Red Hat's virtualization team, but not on converting gusts from VMware to KVM.

by kashyapc

1/13/2025 at 5:21:28 PM

> Every IT department I know is scrambling to replace their VMWare stack ASAP, including very large ones.

At least some of the big ones seem to just pay up. Probably because they / their MSP / their relationship with their MSP is so dysfunctional that they know migrating is a pipe dream.

by formerly_proven

1/13/2025 at 7:52:10 PM

As former DevOps who dealt with VMware, it's not relationship with MSP. It's just so many things plugin to VMware that migrating off of VMware is just difficult. Monitoring, Backups, Deployment and so forth are deeply integrated into VMware so companies just look at work involved getting off and go, never mind.

by stackskipton

1/14/2025 at 12:29:51 AM

There are tons of supported solutions in this space, such as Openstack, Kubevirt, and oVirt (and many more).

by rwmj

1/13/2025 at 7:38:28 PM

Is there a reason Proxmox wouldn't work for many of them?

by icedchai

1/13/2025 at 7:44:12 PM

Proxmox is limited in the tooling available to manage larger deployments. Although they have very recently made some good progress in improving support for these use cases.

by kube-system

1/13/2025 at 9:59:07 PM

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Proxmox_Datacenter_Manager_Road...

by guerby

1/13/2025 at 10:09:24 PM

Yep, that's the progress I'm referring to. I'd say this is pretty basic functionality (managing more than one cluster) for enterprise type deployments. Proxmox might do a lot, but it doesn't have feature parity with VMware's stuff.

by kube-system

1/13/2025 at 7:40:37 PM

Or just use https://opennebula.io/ based on KVM, still works with vmware if needed. ~20 year old project. It has legs

by downrightmike

1/13/2025 at 7:23:49 PM

Soon.

by intelVISA

1/13/2025 at 2:22:17 PM

Good to see companies calling Broadcom's bluff!

by wkat4242

1/13/2025 at 3:08:04 PM

Did Broadcom ever justify price-gouging captive customers after acquiring VMware?

("Sorry, folks, poor banana harvest this year, so we have to pass on the skyrocketing cost of bits licensing, which runs on bananas"?)

by neilv

1/13/2025 at 4:12:28 PM

The first thing Broadcom did after acquiring the company was announce that they were going to offload their small customers and increase revenue by raising prices on their big customers. There was lots of warning.

by bityard

1/13/2025 at 4:58:09 PM

Weren't they saying, Once you are captive to a Broadcom product, Broadcom will have no qualms about totally screwing you with bait&switch huge price jumps?

Isn't that an interesting message to be sending, when much of their business involves getting some very price-conscious companies (think electronics bill-of-materials) to build upon their products?

Or do customers of other Broadcom products already not trust them an inch? So Broadcom wasn't costing themselves valuable reputation here?

by neilv

1/13/2025 at 3:37:51 PM

Why would they need to justify it? Lots of enterprises are captive to VmWare. Their entire IT staff has been using it their whole careers.

by fred_is_fred

1/13/2025 at 7:56:23 PM

Why would a for-profit company have to justify increasing prices?

by UltraSane

1/14/2025 at 12:27:56 AM

Because when they increase their prices too much, they lose the customers, which loses money. Why would a for-profit company want to lose money?

by zerd

1/13/2025 at 3:19:35 PM

They spent money on the acquisition and they would like to see some back. Isn’t that obvious?

by rad_gruchalski

1/13/2025 at 3:20:19 PM

There is a lot of road between "reasonable return on capital invested" and "we are going to rake you over the coals so badly people are going to publicly flee to not be captive to us."

by toomuchtodo

1/13/2025 at 3:22:56 PM

Well, it’s Broadcom and they just spent the money so they want some back. It’s like IBM: acquire and rake.

Hey IBM employees, it doesn’t matter how upset you get. It is what it is.

by rad_gruchalski

1/13/2025 at 7:57:55 PM

No one said it wasn't obvious, we're saying spending almost $70bn on a company and announcing that the only way you can make it back is by squeezing 10x more out of the big fish, that might not have been smart.

by burnte

1/13/2025 at 8:59:56 PM

Apparently they are known for that so I'm not sure why acting surprised.

by rad_gruchalski

1/13/2025 at 3:33:26 PM

[dead]

by 0xedd

1/13/2025 at 3:48:28 PM

They only mention KVM, however KVM is a kernel API and not a full hypervisor, and can't do half the things they claim it does (like support for certain disk images). What hypervisor are they actually using, does anybody know? Probably qemu? It doesn't feel like a major enough company to be able to write its own like Google did.

by homebrewer

1/13/2025 at 3:56:01 PM

They are most assuredly using qemu. It's been my experience that when most people say "KVM" they usually are referring to the whole libvirt ecosystem. I assume that's the case here. I think of it very analogously to how people say "linux" to refer to a full OS/distro such as Fedora. Though "linux" is just a kernel, it's become common parlance.

by freedomben

1/13/2025 at 5:11:39 PM

KVM is not only the kernel side - the userspace side of KVM was implemented in a fork of qemu. That fork later got merged into mainline qemu, so qemu is the "original" implementation of a KVM hypervisor.

by blueflow

1/13/2025 at 6:30:26 PM

Netcup seem to use qemu[0], which is what Anexia will also use according to OP's article

[0]https://old.reddit.com/r/VPS/comments/1ghz4fd/i_know_contabo...

by bertman

1/13/2025 at 3:52:56 PM

They probably mean libvirtd/qemu, when people say "we used kvm" that's generally what they mean.

by klooney

1/13/2025 at 3:25:10 PM

A-nexia, does it mean "lack of connectivity"? Great name for a cloud provider :)

by throw310822

1/13/2025 at 5:37:09 PM

Anexia means "patience, humility" in Ancient Greek. Maybe that's what they were after?

by kgeist

1/13/2025 at 4:44:22 PM

Or "to annex" [1], as in all your VMs (are) belong to us [2]

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/annex

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us

by pmontra

1/13/2025 at 4:11:49 PM

It's close to Anoxia and Alexia, which are also "nice" choices to be known for.

by szszrk

1/14/2025 at 5:58:25 AM

Incredible to see how much value Broadcom is destroying.

by leoh

1/13/2025 at 10:44:07 PM

Hard to imagine how other similar companies wouldn't just follow suit even if the cost of staying with VMware wasn't prohibitive (which is unlikely for most cases, probably).

Stupid business decisions should be punished by the customer walking out. Homebrew KVM is not that hard.

by hd4

1/13/2025 at 9:27:40 PM

I heard first-hand years ago of a bug in VMWare that was _CPU-Level_ for the company that rolled it out in an effort to replace their PCs that had software locally installed. The failure would have been catastrophic for a company that had just replaced all its PCs. However, they hadn't shipped the old PCs away yet for destruction, and managed to keep the lights on by putting them all back out again until the problem was fixed.

by pcblues

1/13/2025 at 5:26:30 PM

12000 VMs = 800 to 1200 baremetals. Since KVM can run vmdk images, it is more of how to manage all these barementals and VMs from a central place.

by raincom

1/14/2025 at 1:41:51 AM

We have run 8,000 VMs on ~120 servers

by AviationAtom

1/13/2025 at 9:36:15 PM

That depends, on a modern Epyc, you can easily run a few thousand VM's on one system.

by olavgg

1/14/2025 at 8:55:38 AM

How do you run thousands of VM's on 192 physical cores? That must be assuming that large percentage of VM's are idling most of the time.

by menaerus

1/15/2025 at 12:36:13 PM

That's pretty commonly the case.

by justinclift

1/15/2025 at 2:47:09 PM

I understand but I'm just curious to learn under what conditions.

by menaerus

1/13/2025 at 6:26:47 PM

Congratulations Anexia, well done! Pulling this off means you have experienced leaders and excellent engineers.

by smetj

1/13/2025 at 2:54:32 PM

Seems like a good move and everything but 12,000 doesn't sound like that many VMs? Is that a lot of VMs?

by depr

1/13/2025 at 3:21:29 PM

In terms of VMware customers it isn't a ton of VM but not peanuts either. E.g. the last healthcare place I was at (single customer rather than cloud provider) had ~30k VMware VMs and we were still small fish compared to some others. I've heard of places 10x the VM count as this making the move post acquisition - albeit less publicly.

I think the purpose of the article is to highlight companies like this are starting/continuing to migrate post-acquisition rather than this particular customer was impressively large and did so. Particularly with the bits about the relative cost increase even though the customer was willing to walk away if needed.

by zamadatix

1/13/2025 at 3:33:58 PM

Single customer 30k sounds a lot easier to migrate (or at least to schedule) than 12k with potentially 3k different customers (probably more like several dozens or a couple hundred)

by wink

1/13/2025 at 4:42:37 PM

Could be, lots of pros and cons to each scenario - doubt either are easy by any measure.

E.g. for about 20% we didn't even have a single piece of documentation other than the server name for who might actually care about the VM going down for the migration we wanted to schedule. Let alone how to test the migration, when it is best to do it, what software was actually running on it, if it's actually managed/monitored integrated with/by other systems whoch need to be looked at too, or if it could just be shit down instead (yay healthcare mergers and acqs). Our migration was also to VMware from (mostly) Hyper-V at the time, so not as much custom tooling needed.

On the flip side a cloud provider is going to have all of the owner contact info but no direct control of the guest OS to effect the change so the battle is more with trying to get the customers to care enough to do the migration with you but not be so bothered by it all they up and leave your hosting.Not exactly a walk in the park either.

In either case - almost never the tech that's the hard part for sure :).

by zamadatix

1/14/2025 at 12:35:17 AM

I'm involved with Red Hat's effort to shift customers off VMware (upstream project: https://github.com/libguestfs/virt-v2v). Things have really blown up since the Broadcom acquisition at the end of 2023. For us 12K VMs is a medium to large customer, but definitely not unusual. Think someone like a regional bank.

A full conversion of such a customer might involve one consultant on-site, a scoping exercise to classify the VMs into groups and assess which ones are going to be more or less difficult to convert, and perhaps 1-3 months of work to convert them all. Individual VMs would be down from anything between a simple reboot, up to 12 hours, depending on which strategy we used for conversion (there are complicated trade-offs related to storage and network bandwidth).

by rwmj

1/15/2025 at 12:37:53 PM

Sounds like it's similar to what happened with PostgreSQL after Oracle bought MySQL. ;)

by justinclift

1/13/2025 at 6:03:54 PM

That depends on your context. 12,000 VMs is enough to a fairly large chunk of a small countries healthcare infrastructure, if not all of it.

It a pretty decent amount of VMs, but not close to being unmanageable. I think it's more down to how the rest of your infrastructure looks, if we're talking about ease of migration.

by mrweasel

1/13/2025 at 3:23:50 PM

Entirely depends on context, like asking how long is a piece of string. One VM could be 200 cores, or it could be 1 core. It could also be a kubernetes/docker worker as-well so one VM may be thousands of containers. Finally they could instead just be important VM's. You could imagine a small or medium company having maybe 4 VM's each for prod, staging, testing etc... letting CDN's handle scaling (with everything else running on local dev machines) and so that 12,000 could be an entire 3,000 companies whole stacks.

by zipy124

1/13/2025 at 3:23:45 PM

Difficult to say. That could conceivably fit in one rack of 60 compute nodes (1/2U size) at 200VMs per node, leaving 15U for networking and SAN. Maybe $100/year/VM (rough cost of a lower-end cloud VM like EC2, droplet, etc.) in that case so $1.2 million per year cost.

Or it could take 10 racks and $50 million per year.

by aaronax

1/13/2025 at 5:42:06 PM

The article says, right at the start,

> Anexia was founded in 2006, is based in Austria, and provides cloud services from over 100 locations around the world by placing equipment in third party datacenters.

From the company's homepage:

> The founder and CEO of Anexia [...] recently acquired a small hydropower plant in Kammern in the Liesingtal region of Styria for a “significant seven-figure sum” – i.e. several million euros. The power plant on the River Liesing generates 600 KW of electricity, enough to cover a third of the electricity consumption of Anexia’s Vienna data center

so this seems to be a significant operation.

by Symbiote

1/13/2025 at 10:02:41 PM

While average power consumption per rack has been increasing fairly steadily over the past 10 years, the metric I currently use is abound 10kW per rack under reasonable to heavy load - that's about the same as a consumer electric shower.

So, this is implying their Vienna data center has 180 racks? With 60 being about a third, if we say each rack has 40 servers... that's ~7k servers total... which is a sizeable chunk of floor space, like 3000m^2, or... 40 tennis courts?

But yea, that a non-insignificant operation just for the Vienna data center.

by quesomaster9000

1/13/2025 at 3:34:30 PM

[dead]

by 0xedd

1/13/2025 at 3:45:01 PM

If the claims about AI capabilities are true, it's matter of time before all providers to switch to homegrown solutions.

by mrtksn

1/13/2025 at 3:56:14 PM

The funny part is you can convince an LLM any bullshit you propose is right. It will agree with anything you say unless you encourage it not to and even then…

“VMWare costs too much. Our use case is incredibly niche and nothing out there seems like it would fulfill our needs. Can you help me write a new stack using bash scripts and AWK?”

“What an exciting idea! Bash Scripting is a clever way to orchestrate 12,000 virtual machines. Here, let me provide you with a bunch of code to copy and paste without doing any requirements gathering whatsoever.

These bash scripts will let you run 12,000 virtual machines. Let me know if you need any explanation!”

“I forgot to me to mention we need to provision these using a rest api. Also these are globally distributed and require extensive monitoring”

“Not a problem! REST is an excellent way to communicate with the platform. I won’t bother asking any follow up questions or gathering any more requirements. Here is all the code you need:”

… and so on…

by cruffle_duffle

1/13/2025 at 4:20:31 PM

If you know what are you doing in general, I'm convinced that it can actually help you out but I had 0 success with doing it brainfuck(chatgpt claims that anything beyond hello world is too complicated haha).

Just like with the image and video generators, I'm fishing to find evidence of machines building something useful - had very little success so far.

If the claims are true and these huge investments are not done in vain, not too far in the future we should be able to tell AI to build the tools we need, for example Microsoft should be expecting to discontinue MS Office either because someone can tell AI to make them an Excel instead of paying a subscription or tell AI to just do the job they will do in Excel.

It's very strange that they talk about replacing the developers with AI but somehow still sell software. Something doesn't add up.

by mrtksn

1/13/2025 at 7:39:22 PM

> It's very strange that they talk about replacing the developers with AI but somehow still sell software. Something doesn't add up.

There's a simple answer. This is the "replacement" fallacy that is all too common when hypothesizing the impact of tooling. Tooling increases the productivity of workers. This "replaces" workers in that you will need fewer of them to do the same job, but can't replace all of them because zero times anything is zero.

If you have 10 people shoveling, you can replace 9 workers of them with a backhoe. But a backhoe can't replace all 10 workers.

by kube-system

1/13/2025 at 8:11:20 PM

The talk is literally about replacing developers, engineers, and scientist with AI. It is not advertised as a developer tool, it is advertised as a someone who has PhD and ideally we will have AGI soon. companies are not talking about making even greater products they’re talking about cutting off developers through the same thing.

for example, salesforce proudly announced that it’s not hiring the developers this year because they are going to use AI. they don’t intend to make even greater software with the same developers using AI, they intend to replace them.

i’m getting the vibes that nobody at the top believes that AI actually can replace anybody. I find this interesting.

by mrtksn

1/13/2025 at 8:22:54 PM

Advertisers are perennially full of shit. Generative AI is a technology, and just like literally every useful technology created since the dawn of man, it improves productivity.

A box of literal rocks does not do anything on its own, even if we have tricked them into thinking even better than we did last year.

Literally for hundreds of years have people been fear mongering that some new technology will replace workers. It never happens. Technology displaces the available distribution of jobs, but it doesn't eliminate the need for people... and it never will, because human jobs are a human construct.

> salesforce proudly announced that it’s not hiring the developers this year because they are going to use AI.

Yeah, more bullshit. Translated, they really mean: "Hey our AI is so great that we don't have to hire developers anymore -- it's definitely not because we have 70k+ employees and our payroll is way too big -- it's because we're so good at AI and you should totally buy our software #EinsteinAIRocks #SalesforceOhana"

by kube-system

1/13/2025 at 10:19:13 PM

I agree, it's absolutely and entirely bullshit and is becoming an easy sloganism that you can bash around. Where "replacing developers, engineers, and scientist with AI" really is about 'doing more with less'... or... just 'doing more, faster?'.

But it is genuinely replacing workers, in real terms. And more importantly it's replacing services, which in turn means jobs and revenue. So they too turn to electricity & automation, so they can do more... so they can remain competitive.

So uh yea, I 100% agree with you there, and wish that more people saw straight through it like you do.

by quesomaster9000