231–240 of 321 posts
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…
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…
But I would expect that a large established company would do better to create it's own reasonably priced reasonably managed infrastructure.
Sort of rent vs build/own.
https://web.archive.org/web/20191021160628/https://www.busin...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t know, in the Bay Area 150k is entry level and big companies pay 250k or much higher to senior engineers. Whenever I hear about pay in Europe it’s a fraction of that. It may be worth it for a different lifestyle, I’m not making that argument. Regardless, from the company POV it must lead to different choices about buy vs. build.
Bay area or NYC sure, that's like being in London, but what about the Midwest, or any of the places where you can easily set up an IT shop without paying a premium for space?
why do I not believe this?
Sure, you don't need those admins to rack up new servers, but don't you just trade those costs for costs around AWS "devops"? (IAM / authentication anyone?).
I keep hearing execs telling me that moving from self-hosted to AWS is going to save a ton of money ... but I just don't believe it. I would assume if you're that bad at running an IT business in-house, you'll be just as bad at it in the cloud.
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…
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?
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah but you don’t need data center engineers, real estate specialists. Power specialists. Etc.
Sure you do, you’re just blending them into the rate, at a significant margin. Cloud is awesome for companies where the capital investment needed to deliver the SLA is too expensive. If you’re big, and you run the numbers, lots of services are better in a datacenter that you manage. Many of the early advantages of cloud tools aren’t a differentiator today. If anything, the granular billing is a nightmare to manage in…