From time to time, we get the question of explaining DownToZero and what makes it stand out from other cloud services to non-technical people. We’ve tried various explanations, but we found an analogy that resonates with most people. We wanted to share it here to make our principle accessible to more people.
After a long workday, you are driving home. Arriving at your house, you pull into your driveway, turn off the car, and go into the house. Even if you plan to go shopping later that day, you still turn off the car because leaving it running seems wasteful.
So later that day, you go back to your car to go shopping. You turn the car back on and drive to the shop. Coming back home, you turn off your car for the night. Even if it is cold at night and inconvenient for the heating to kick in and the seats to warm up in the morning, we still turn the car off. Keeping the car running seems ridiculous for just a few minutes of warm-up time.
For cars, we have developed an understanding that it is not very practical or cost-effective to keep them running all the time. We are fine with a warm-up phase, and manufacturers have invested heavily in making this phase more convenient.
Now, for IT services and machines, we expect all services to be running at all times. The reason is convenience, so we always opt for “always-on” because the cost is acceptable. DownToZero breaks with that habit by shutting down everything that is not in use. This approach is called “scale-to-zero.” We incorporate scale-to-zero at every possible point because achieving sustainability requires not just green energy or more efficient CPUs but also shutting down unused software. We believe that following this path will have the most significant impact. We did it for cars, and it is natural to use cars this way. Now it is time to apply this paradigm to software too.