The appeal of the cloud is less IT politics which in big company is a serious problem. Business Units can sidestep IT and go “self service” and spare a lot of pain and time in dealing with IT. I don’t think any serious manager going into the cloud is doing it for the savings. But of course this is a bank and technology is their future so it makes sense that they want to keep a tight loop on the cloud activities.
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
#52Obviously 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.
Congratulations, you’re now spending more on barebones servers than a colo and you’re still spending just as much on managing resources - now you have the worse of both worlds.
Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
#53Is this a story about virtualization? I fail to see the distinction between data center and private cloud in this context.
I was going to explain how there's no difference but then I thought about the more facetious terminology cloud - someone else's computers private cloud - someone else's computers that you own???? or that nobody else uses, but in this context you also own???
Cloud also means access on-demand by API.
Private cloud usually refers to that same abstraction layer. Hardware provisioning is abstracted away from use and available on-demand from a pool, and likewise deployment works automatically via the same or an equivalent API.
That's very different from the operation of a typical company-owned datacenter from a couple of decades ago.
Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
#54Get outta my dreams. Get into my cloud.
Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
#55Obviously 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.
Small businesses have an option to not overengineer in the first place.
Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
#56I 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 (although that can reduce internal politics and inefficiencies), but making fewer decisions and more importantly reducing the potential for making the wrong decisions
This is a myth directly from cloud providers marketing campaigns: that using the cloud simplifies infrastructure to the point that you don't need as much and/or as qualified staff.
In reality it is quite the trap: without experienced system administrators AWS and the like are free to dig their hands deeper and deeper into the pockets of their unsuspecting customers.
Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
#57Bad title. They didn't switch from AWS to private cloud. They consolidated 60 data centers with 200k servers to 23 data centers and 70k servers.
The title isn't bad: "ignoring" implies they were never on AWS and just went their own way.
It is a bad title. The inclusion of "ignoring Amazon" implies that the difference between the using AWS and not using AWS is $2B. Otherwise, it makes as much sense to title it "Bank of America saved $2B per year ignoring shark attacks, building own cloud".
Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
#58Bad title. They didn't switch from AWS to private cloud. They consolidated 60 data centers with 200k servers to 23 data centers and 70k servers.
The title isn't bad: "ignoring" implies they were never on AWS and just went their own way.
The savings implies they saved $2B over AWS. I can't read the article since I don't have a BI account, but unless they saved $2B over AWS (rather than $2B over their previous infrastructure) it's definitely misleading.
Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
#59It saved 2bn compared to what it spend on its old infrastructure right? Not 2bn compared to the (totally unknown) cost of AWS instead.
Full disclosure, I've had baml as a client and dealt with their desktop support, fix and brokerage tech support and their TRP systems. I wouldn't trust them to point out the window at a cloud let alone build and maintain one. So I'm more than a bit dubious of this story...
Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Some would say, non-existent.