Looks like the anti AWS submarine is being deployed. Arr.
Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
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Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
#42If you know your traffic well, private cloud saves a lot of money. Few years back i bet hybrid clouds will take over and for some reason it did not happen. I still believe hybrid cloud is the solution for mid size and up companies. You definitely need cloud provides for handling traffic spikes.
Nobody ever got fired for using AWS.
I'm sure at least a few companies have gone bankrupt or people have gotten pink-slipped for using AWS and not paying attention to auto-scaling settings...
It's scarily easy to accrue huge bills if you're not watching things closely.
Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
#43This is completely false - I imagine they didn't take into account how much the migration and upkeep actually cost them. AWS's promise is not that its infrastructure itself is cheaper in terms of number of servers, or otherwise. Its cheaper in that it helps automate a lot of manual things away.
2 Billion per year buys a lot of R&D. So, while Amazon is great for small to mid sized companies, BoA is huge and would need massive discounts to consider using Amazon.
Amazon can invest heavily in new tech because it has millions of customers who get the benefit. BofA can only invest in new tech to the degree that it benefits one (admittedly large) customer. This makes the decision seem more suspect in the long-run.
Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
#44Obviously small businesses don't have the option of building their own cloud, but there is a middle ground: use public clouds, but avoid coupling yourself to them. Most cloud providers provide servers that can be treated like a barebones Linux server, and that's all you really need to be productive with most server applications.
Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
#45I think a strong argument can be made either way. There's definitely financial savings to be had by doing it in-house (either literally or utilizing existing data centers as here). But what I've experienced is that companies are often attracted to Big Cloud™ not just for financial reasons but to flatten/simplify their corporate reporting structure. It is the ultimate delegation. This isn't simply about having fewer s…
> This isn't simply about having fewer staff
I've always wondered about this. In IT now instead of having 5 system operators one has 10 "cloud consultants" and nobody knows what they are doing. I've been through a couple of "migrations to the cloud" now and I've never seen a reduction in IT staff or the cost of running IT operations.
About the wrong decisioning part, if you chose the wrong "cloud" for your business the cost to change can be enormous.
The primary motivation for management is from what I've seen so far the ability to point to someone else if shit hits the fan, not cost reduction and all that other stuff.
Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
#46I think a strong argument can be made either way. There's definitely financial savings to be had by doing it in-house (either literally or utilizing existing data centers as here). But what I've experienced is that companies are often attracted to Big Cloud™ not just for financial reasons but to flatten/simplify their corporate reporting structure. It is the ultimate delegation. This isn't simply about having fewer s…
Also reducing friction in getting products to market. A small team with their own BigCloud account is probably going to deliver a product to market much faster than one that needs to go through the friction of dealing with the various IT departments which invariably exist at large companies. There is absolutely value to delivering a product to market a year or more sooner than otherwise.
But at a large company, how likely is it that a team is going to have their own AWS account AND have free rein over it? You'll still have all of the friction for compliance and security. And turf battles.
It's like using package managers like Maven and npm. Sure, they make going to market much faster for small organizations. But at companies that have strict security procedures, downloading unvetted stuff from the internets and putting it into production does not fly. You'll have internal repos that work with your package manager tools, but nothing gets into those repos without at least a cursory review.
Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
#47[deleted]
Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
#48This is completely false - I imagine they didn't take into account how much the migration and upkeep actually cost them. AWS's promise is not that its infrastructure itself is cheaper in terms of number of servers, or otherwise. Its cheaper in that it helps automate a lot of manual things away.
I had experience in Quartz (BofA cloud), and deploying is 100 times easier than AWS, everything is automated. Imagine building a cloud service where you trust all your clients, and all must share the same information if they have the correct auth, what I trying to say is that their use-case actually made it simpler, that's where the savings in software had came from.
Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
#49"the cloud" = your data is now our data on our computers (I think we all know this). When companies like Microsoft start saving my files to their personal servers as default, I hate you. Stop.
Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because of the capital and talent required to build a competitive offering. Even large companies like IBM and Oracle have failed to keep up. The big 3 clouds have built a nice moat and can charge whatever they want. They still compete on prices but it's clear they're colluding on network fees at least.
It's not just capital or talent. I have seen first hand non-tech executive decision makers pick a specific cloud provider because of the old adage "No one got fired for buying IBM". That momentum is incredibly hard to compete against. Google Cloud is fairly solid from a technology perspective, not to mention Google's deep pockets, and still has an uphill climb against MS and AWS.
GCP may be just as good technologically, but their customer support and especially enterprise support is piss poor.