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

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

#141

Post by maximente » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 7:50 PM UTC

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?

- some banks are spending huge on internal infra in order to tie together various arms of the bank, e.g. consumer lending with small business lending with personal banking, quantitative finance getting better feature vectors from other parts of the bank, ... . banks understand that they have mondo data, so want to make it accessible to everyone. sort of like the API craze, where people build cool stuff with APIs once they are exposed; you can't quite imagine what but know value added stuff will bubble up

- the instantaneous nature of things in today's world is bleeding into finance, where banks want to advertise/offer near instant access to credit, loans, etc. instead of turn around time of days. in order to do that, it helps a lot to basically unify data across tons of previous disparate orgs, shared infra, etc.

- cybersecurity/auditing/compliance can be very expensive to license or contract for and occasionally has to be run on company hardware due to legal issues

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

#142

Post by Havoc » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 7:51 PM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #27

> "Now, it's pared that down to 70,000 servers, of which 8,000 of those are handling the bulk of the load." I wonder what the other 62000 servers are doing.

Minecraft

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

#143

Post by cbsmith » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 7:52 PM UTC

That implies their business would have data center costs beyond most tech companies (Lyft for example is spending $300 million with AWS over three years, Snap is spending $3 billion over five years).

Something doesn't add up here.

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

#144

Post by TomMarius » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 7:52 PM UTC

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.

The popularity of MBA is nearly zero in the EU

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

#145

Post by signal11 » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 7:54 PM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #23

thorwasdfasdf wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but why aren't those fat profit margins being competed away by competitors?

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.

IBM and Oracle are really not in the same class as AWS, Azure and GCP, when it comes to investing in cloud infrastructure. They’re bit players at best: http://www.platformonomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/cl...

From this article: https://www.platformonomics.com/2018/05/follow-the-capex-sep...

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

#146

Post by learc83 » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 7:55 PM UTC

aeturnum wrote: post #98

trabant00 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Auto manufacturers use machines built by other businesses and parts built by other businesses.

Yeah but they generally aren't renting those machines. Renting critical pieces of business infrastructure that aren't easily replaceable is opening yourself up to rent seeking on the part of your supplier. Remember the Oracle business model--lock people in and then keep raising the price just below what it would cost to rebuild from scratch.

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

#147

Post by gamesbrainiac » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 7:59 PM UTC

Something does not make sense here. The main cost savings seem to come from using fewer servers. Why could you simply not do this on Azure or GCP or AWS? Are the advantages coming from leveraging bare metal servers? I'm a little confused.

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

#148

Post by Skunkleton » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 7:59 PM UTC

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…

Is $15,000 per server normal?

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

#149

Post by sgt101 » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 7:59 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #50

toomuchtodo wrote: post #25

Earlier 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.

Their model is third party partners.

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

#150

Post by hinkley » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 8:04 PM UTC

pawelk wrote: post #134

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?

> These are facebook numbers. For a bank. I could turn this around and ask, why would Facebook ever need infrastructure on par with BofA? I'm not an expert on infrastructure, but given their size, revenue, market position, number of customers etc, there's nothing baffling about these numbers.

When I wrote software for telcos, we had levels of logging that cloud users are only starting to reach ten, fifteen years later. From what I hear banks are even worse.

When you are collecting that much of an audit trail, that data transitions from being a problem to manage to the problem to manage.

I wonder how many bespoke Kafka work-alikes there are out there that are older than the authors of kafka.