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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

#121

Post by birdyrooster »

chatmasta wrote: post #31
stiray wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...but they are also acumulating know how which they might be able to sell in decades to come. Even more if the scenario of mainframes, IBM software, Oracle databases,... will happen and sooner or later I believe it will. Currently cloud providers are operating on absolute minimum, to get as much customers as possible into their trap. And for sure, it is highly beneficial for startups that cant afford to buy on premi…

Operating at a minimum? How do you come to that conclusion? From a pure cost of infrastructure perspective (ignoring all the human elements), the cloud is always more expensive than any other option. It’s got some of the most ridiculous margins and price gouging of any business out there. I think the opposite will happen. Cloud providers are becoming commoditized. Kubernetes, blah blah. Developers hate lock-in, and o…

Great call out for Kubernetes. I’m a full believer that it will turn cloud providers into dumb aggregations of compute/network/storage (like simple utility companies) for the deployment of CRDs and Operators, which will obviate the need for AWS services like EBS, Route 53, RDS, and many many other offerings. This will lower the cost to entry for competitors and lower prices for everyone.

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

#122

Post by esoterica »

twa927 wrote: post #81
ddorian43 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can rent dedicated server or onprem ? people always go from cloud to building your own cpu in these threads, never in the middle

Yes, this also seems weird to me. And I think it might be a cultural thing, I noticed that in Europe renting dedicated servers is far more popular than in the US.

Maybe it’s because wages are a lot lower in Europe? Better to outsource to the cloud than hire more people if people are expensive.

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

#123

Post by dbcfd »

shakil wrote: post #78

Looks like $2B of savings are from reducing the number of servers (200,000 servers earlier to 70,000 now). That has nothing to do with the advantages of a private cloud over public, etc. They were just over-deployed and by reducing the number of servers they would have enjoyed similar savings no matter where they were running them. In fact they could have saved even more, and earlier, if they had already been in the…

  But the results have been dramatic. The company once had
  200,000 servers and roughly 60 data centers. Now, it's 
  pared that down to 70,000 servers, of which 8,000 are 
  handling the bulk of the load. And they've more than 
  halved their data centers down to 23.
They say they save 25%-30% over the cloud, which is to be expected since the cloud has a profit margin. They also say that might not last.

I'm going with clickbait title. Nothing to see here other than someone getting a temporary savings which we will see as a write off in 5 years.

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

#124

Post by gpm »

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?

I'm not sure why you find this surprising, a bank has a much more complicated problem space than Facebook.

- They have a reasonably similar number of users (a fraction, but a large one).

- Mistakes cost a lot, so they have to be a lot more careful. It's a lot easier to make money hacking a bank than hacking facebook.

- They have to comply with all sorts of regulations.

- They probably don't trust their own employees to not be trying to commit fraud.

- They have to parse data on a scale that is likely similar or greater than facebook's. To detect fraud/lost credit cards/.... To decide who to give loans to. To price insurance. To decide how to trade stocks. ...

- They have to run a physical fleet of devices in the field, outside of their control, that have to give people the right amount of money ~100% of the time.

At a glance I see that Facebook has something like 300 petabytes of data [0]. I've worked at a bank, my team had something more like 10, but I don't think much of it was things like video that are just naturally huge. BOA is also approximately an order of magnitude bigger than the bank I was at.

One rumor I heard while there was that there had been a bug in one of our mobile apps that had been costing us a million dollars a day in server time.

[0] https://www.brandwatch.com/blog/facebook-statistics/

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

#126

Post by julienfr112 »

I work for banks, and I can tell you that when you are doing devops with their "own cloud", you are miles away from a real cloud experience : no os choice, no hardware choice, slow provisioning, no access to repo, low and inconstant virtual disk (EBS) speed... I guess that you get what your paied for, and maybe the 2B saved on cloud are spend on IT service that suffer from such a poor own cloud experience. If they have 50 000 IT employees payed 100k, that's 5b a year. Including professional services and you are maybe at 10b. Just increase the productivity of this 10b by 20% and the money "saved" is not such a good deal...

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

#127

Post by 0000011111 »

julienfr112 wrote: post #126

I work for banks, and I can tell you that when you are doing devops with their "own cloud", you are miles away from a real cloud experience : no os choice, no hardware choice, slow provisioning, no access to repo, low and inconstant virtual disk (EBS) speed... I guess that you get what your paied for, and maybe the 2B saved on cloud are spend on IT service that suffer from such a poor own cloud experience. If they ha…

Exactly.

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

#129

Post by SomeOtherThrow »

gpm wrote: post #124
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?

I'm not sure why you find this surprising, a bank has a much more complicated problem space than Facebook. - They have a reasonably similar number of users (a fraction, but a large one). - Mistakes cost a lot, so they have to be a lot more careful. It's a lot easier to make money hacking a bank than hacking facebook. - They have to comply with all sorts of regulations. - They probably don't trust their own employees…

How do you spend that much on software and have such an abysmal usability and security story? I don't think there is anything technically difficult about the consumer software they offer, namely https://www.bankofamerica.com/.

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

#130

Post by codingslave »

julienfr112 wrote: post #126

I work for banks, and I can tell you that when you are doing devops with their "own cloud", you are miles away from a real cloud experience : no os choice, no hardware choice, slow provisioning, no access to repo, low and inconstant virtual disk (EBS) speed... I guess that you get what your paied for, and maybe the 2B saved on cloud are spend on IT service that suffer from such a poor own cloud experience. If they ha…

Probably more than half of the engineers writing the code for their cloud are either based out of india, making 40k a year, or in the USA, making 50% of the market rate.
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