211–220 of 321 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I used to work at a very large financial publishing company. I joined just at the point where they were moving from VMware to AWS. It was never a cost saving exercise. It was a way to completely change the culture of the IT department. As they were one of the very first news websites, they had at the time ~18 years of cruft to deal with. The drive to the cloud was about flexibility, and if we are honest, shaking the…
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.
Tech companies don't necessarily spend more on computing resources than non-tech companies. The article says they had 200,000 servers in 60 datacenters. That is certainly more than most tech companies, and is not surprising. A large bank probably has more computing needs than someone like Lyft.
I used to work in banking... their compute needs are actually quite basic.
I think what we're really seeing here is some creative accounting around how operations and costs are accounted for. They've got to be talking about costs of managing and operating their cloud as well, and most of those costs would be in terms of training & workforce retooling.
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…
> 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…
To your point, we need only point to recent events to show the universal customer pain that can be caused by a bad code push at Azure or AWS.
That's almost as much as they make on overdraft fees!
Though there is something comforting about a predictably evil company though. Much more straightforward than "do no evil" while building a surveillance machine that would make a Stasi officer blush, or "this helps our users" while hindering Hong Kong's protests.
I used to work at a very large financial publishing company. I joined just at the point where they were moving from VMware to AWS. It was never a cost saving exercise. It was a way to completely change the culture of the IT department. As they were one of the very first news websites, they had at the time ~18 years of cruft to deal with. The drive to the cloud was about flexibility, and if we are honest, shaking the…
> It will continue to rise because it offers flexibility ... The cloud is more expensive for large companies, for most workloads. The way I read this is that the operating costs are higher in the cloud, but presumably dwarfed by recouped opportunity costs. This makes sense to me, given my limited experience working in large companies where every interaction with IT involved a 2-6 week turnaround time. Need a VM? Fill…
The true opportunity cost in large corporations is from, IMHO, been the general attitude of "we can't do foo new thing because that's [not best practice, not (barely) supported by some other large corporation, too cheap, too big of a change, etc]."
The ability to create extremely flexible workloads in minutes means nothing when security has to approve sneezes and containers are only something you'd find in a fridge.
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…
BOA also didn't (doesn't) really trust the public cloud. During several all hands meetings in the org, the inevitable question of "when are we gonna start using the public cloud" came up and the leaders would always say "we aren't because it isn't secure enough" or "we'd rather maintain our current governance model over what our devs build". To your point, we need only point to recent events to show the universal cus…
If a company (or person) really wants complete visibility and control into their relationship with law enforcement, they have to host their own hardware... ideally, their own data center.
I used to work at a very large financial publishing company. I joined just at the point where they were moving from VMware to AWS. It was never a cost saving exercise. It was a way to completely change the culture of the IT department. As they were one of the very first news websites, they had at the time ~18 years of cruft to deal with. The drive to the cloud was about flexibility, and if we are honest, shaking the…
The cloud was probably always more expensive if you only considered the cost of computers. But it was about so much more than that. Mostly, it was about creating a hostile environment for the BOFHs who were creating a hostile environment for everyone else.
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's not a comparison of external cloud vs. self hosted though. It is a comparison of different operating models with respect to change control. Either one can exist in both external vs. self-hosted infrastructure. I've been in places where the engineering team plugs in an old PC under a desk somewhere, gives it a public IP address of there's the production server. That's the self-hosted equivalent of the engineeri…
I used to work at a very large financial publishing company. I joined just at the point where they were moving from VMware to AWS. It was never a cost saving exercise. It was a way to completely change the culture of the IT department. As they were one of the very first news websites, they had at the time ~18 years of cruft to deal with. The drive to the cloud was about flexibility, and if we are honest, shaking the…
> the opex was close to £3mil in AWS bills alone What was the opex before cloud?