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Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

businessinsider.com

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Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#91

Post by airstrike »

bloody-crow wrote: post #79

> The bank, which has a $10 billion annual tech budget Am I the only one completely befuddled by this number? What the fuck are they doing with these money and 200k servers? These are facebook numbers. For a bank. What?

Pen-and-paper banking doesn't exist. Everything is done electronically, and BofA is a massive behemoth of a bank.

Tech companies also aren't subject to the same level of scrutiny / regulatory requirements as big banks, plus the need to support old processes and software, etc

Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#92

Post by blunderkid »

Public cloud is definitely a great value for startups. When you are small and want the flexibility and speed and the sophistication that cloud providers make possible. The premium they charge is well worth up to a certain point at least. When you are an established business with mature tech and of the size of BoA, it is a whole different math. Your investment in your own cloud if done right can be a huge saving that can give more mileage (on Wall Street) than your competitors speed in execution, esp if you are a bank, where time to market isn’t exactly a winner.

Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#93

Post by YokoZar »

dijit wrote: post #77
jedberg wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but you don’t need data center engineers, real estate specialists. Power specialists. Etc.

Sure. You just need more people to keep an eye on what your consumption rates are. Or to handle access control systems or manage service accounts and client certificates, ensure firewalls, additional tooling around firewalls to ensure things aren’t getting exposed outside. Countless cost projections on top of a complicated billing system. I mean. You save the headcount in one area and you consume it in another. And y…

> Sure. You just need more people to keep an eye on what your consumption rates are. Or to handle access control systems or manage service accounts and client certificates, ensure firewalls, additional tooling around firewalls to ensure things aren’t getting exposed outside. Countless cost projections on top of a complicated billing system.

At a certain scale, you need all these things with internal clouds too. Resource provisioning, basic security, and managing "insider risk" don't just go away when you own the infrastructure.

Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#94

Post by huslage »

pmoriarty wrote: post #74

Many large companies save money by having their own cloud, but those clouds sometimes really suck compared to AWS. I know of one very large company where any request for a change in their cloud infrastructure always required a minimum two week advanced notice. In AWS such a change is just a mouse click away, and could be done in seconds. AWS also has a really amazing integration of a large variety of services which i…

That sounds like a Cloud in name only.

Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#95

Post by grantseltzer »

I'm not so convinced how great of a job they did.Bank of America has by far the worst user experience I've ever seen. I had an experience recently where I changed my password, and after 2 days my new password stopped working and my old one did.

Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#96

Post by PopeDotNinja »

trabant00 wrote: post #56
Someone1234 wrote: post #14

I 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…

There's nothing simple about debugging opaque error messages & client quirks on AWS.

Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#97

Post by mywittyname »

testplzignore wrote: post #46
mywittyname wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

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?

The two companies I've used AWS at both operated this way. In fact, each team has multiple product accounts (for dev, testing, production). So I don't think it's unusual at all.

Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#98

Post by aeturnum »

trabant00 wrote: post #56
Someone1234 wrote: post #14

I 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…

> This is a myth directly from cloud providers marketing campaigns

I agree the cloud providers like this idea, but I'm not sure I agree it's a myth. Businesses need to choose what competencies to focus on. For nearly every other area, businesses rely on suppliers. Auto manufacturers use machines built by other businesses and parts built by other businesses. They also obviously do some amount of in-house part and tool design. It's a balance and I think that it's a lot more likely that most businesses will want a good partner to provide infrastructure (ultimately at margins less than AWS) instead of building it themselves.

Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#99

Post by shrubble »

api wrote: post #18
sairahul82 wrote: post #5

If 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 am not at liberty to say the company name, but i do directly know of one person at a director level who was fired for using AWS.

They turned on encryption for an option and did not realize the huge price difference between the encrypted and unencrypted option meant $9000 per day in additional charges. After 1 month (30 days) this came to light, and he was fired.

Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#100

Post by dijit »

YokoZar wrote: post #93
dijit wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. You just need more people to keep an eye on what your consumption rates are. Or to handle access control systems or manage service accounts and client certificates, ensure firewalls, additional tooling around firewalls to ensure things aren’t getting exposed outside. Countless cost projections on top of a complicated billing system. I mean. You save the headcount in one area and you consume it in another. And y…

> Sure. You just need more people to keep an eye on what your consumption rates are. Or to handle access control systems or manage service accounts and client certificates, ensure firewalls, additional tooling around firewalls to ensure things aren’t getting exposed outside. Countless cost projections on top of a complicated billing system. At a certain scale, you need all these things with internal clouds too. Resou…

Not nearly in the same way.

This is like saying that "You also need to have a cashier!" when you're comparing a shopping mall to a corner store.

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