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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

#161

Post by angry_octet »

TuringNYC wrote: post #112
zelon88 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In this case BoA are saving money but in exchange retain additional layers of staffing, that require oversight, and ultimately decision makers willing to take risks. I think some companies, like BOA, look at this as the safer alternative. We all assume that large Cloud providers are bulletproof. That's just because we haven't seen them taken down yet. Someday we will. Just wait until there's another major world con…

> In this case BoA are saving money but in exchange retain additional layers of staffing, that require oversight, and ultimately decision makers willing to take risks. I've been at multiple Fortune 50 companies at multiple levels. Many times these types of infrastructure building are just forms of empire building and an attempt to embed ones' services in the organization at a very deep level. You convert one set of c…

What's worse, someone being a prima donna or the unchangeable facts of AWS operation policies? You will always encounter roadblocks and misfeatures, but can you get around them?

Don't get me wrong, most corporate IT is deeply incompetent at their core job. It's just that you can't fix the deep problems by outsourcing the computer part.

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

#162

Post by runT1ME »

dijit wrote: post #100
YokoZar wrote: post #93

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. 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.

How so? Presumably someone with an internal 'cloud' needs someone to be responsible for a large kube cluster, to handle a uniform way to do scheduling/resource management, etc. Having an engineer who knows how to do this in AWS doesn't seem more expensive than an engineer who can roll their own internal 'cloud' system...

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

#163

Post by doovd »

sundbry wrote: post #151
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…

50,000 engineers just to run a bank? I don't think so.

250,000 engineers at JPMorgan.

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

#164

Post by robocat »

If the 2 billion were saved over two years, that is an increase in profit of ~4% over those 8 quarters ((75-56)÷56÷8)§. That's a pretty good outcome.

§ = Q3: "The bank said Wednesday that net income excluding an impairment charge rose 4% to $7.5 billion, or an adjusted 75 cents a share. When including the $2.1 billion charge tied to the end of a partnership with First Data, net income fell to 56 cents a share"

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

#165

Post by segmondy »

stiray wrote: post #26
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…

...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…

I think Bezos is even colder than Ellison, it's going to be sad and hilarious when he decides to put the squeeze on those running on the cloud.

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

#166

Post by kevstev »

doovd wrote: post #163
sundbry wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

50,000 engineers just to run a bank? I don't think so.

250,000 engineers at JPMorgan.

There are ~250k employees at JP Morgan, not engineers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPMorgan_Chase

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

#168

Post by cosmodisk »

jmartrican wrote: post #154
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…

I worked on the internal BOA cloud. My team wrote software to procure VM's via a website, versus the older (still current) way of doing it manually. There are two things worth considering. The BOA cloud is slow. That is to say, it is hard to procure machines to get your projects going. There is a lot of control on who will be paying for them. There is also A LOT of staff to manage it. So those 2 Billion could easily…

"I have seen (and maybe a lot of people here also) small companies with million dollar AWS bills." Ultimately,it doesn't matter, if the value it provides is greater than the AWS bill.

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

#169

Post by gowld »

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…

Why does this argument apply to AWS but not to desktop IT providers, paper office supplies, janitors, cafeteria services, and everything else that a business hires vendors for?

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

#170

Post by gowld »

Counteractual: Suppose BofA wasted $2B per year by building its own cloud. Or is BofA decided to migrate from woncloud to AWS, and wasted $2B in the process? Would a CEO make a public statement about that? Or would they fiddle the numbers (which are impossible for an outsider to verify) to make their decision look like a winner?
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