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

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

#261

Post by weberc2 »

greglindahl wrote: post #246
weberc2 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it better to be locked into your own company’s IT department rather than AWS? I would argue AWS gives a better ROI than 95% of corporate IT departments, and generally less hostile to boot.

One hopes you're not arguing that companies shouldn't bother trying to figure out if they're in the 95% or the 5%.

No, it wouldn’t make sense for me to make the 95/5 distinction only to prescribe a 100/0 response. My post was a call for sober judgment, which is admittedly not very popular here.

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

#262

Post by safog »

So one thing people seem to be ignoring is that cloud != automated provisioning of VMs by engineers.

There’s so much more AWS, GCP and Azure offer these days that trading away all the stuff like metrics, monitoring, dynamo-dB, s3, lambda, scalable RDS, Spark pipelines and generally a whole suite of products that go into building a modern web app for some scripts that can provision on demand seems to be a poor choice.

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

#263

Post by tekknik »

hnick wrote: post #248
aeturnum wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think a company that saves $2B (meaning they were able and willing to spend even more before they had this idea) is more than able to have multiple competencies. Acquisition and vertical integration is how many companies became massive. Of course it's a question of scale, but a lot of arguments I've seen usually come down to CapEx vs OpEx accounting which is silly because a dollar is a dollar.

the difference is CapEx is dropped all at once and OpEx is over time. so the accounting is not the same

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

#264

Post by tekknik »

pentae wrote: post #84
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

Yeah we literally turned our $7k a month AWS bill into $1k a month by changing to 3 dedicated servers (Fully managed!) and cloudflare. It's better in every conceivable way.

what instance types were you using? do the dedis have the same specs as the ec2 instances? what about contracts (do you have one on the dedis?) are you only using servers or other aws services?

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

#265

Post by ivanjaros »

cloud will always be more expensive than bare metal. period. cloud is great to start out when you have no clue about how much power you will need to satisfy your customers and to be flexible enough to cover some unexpected spikes. but once you're out there earning, the only reason to stay on cloud is comfort. business-wise it is a black hole for money. many will argue that cost of personnel to manage your own infra does not favour it over cloud. but if you do the math you will see that savings when renting only three bare metal servers each month will pay a full-time salary for a sysadmin. you don't even need to own your own hardware. the bare metal rentals these days are insanely low and if you truly want to save each penny, you buy your own because in a matter of months you get yor investment back on saved fees alone. the thing is that these big tech companies convinced so many people these days that cloud is the only way that they cannot even fathom how anybody can run on their own hardware. the new sysadmins are already "brainwashed" and inexperienced this way and the old school guys that have experienced managing their own hardware are slowly "dying" out. soon, just a mention of managing your own hardware will become a joke to these newcommers when in reality the cloud was never-ever a cheaper option to go with in the first place. not to mention that these days we have so much technology to make things easy(kubernetes, rancher, proxmox, docker, lxc..) that it is quite laugable to fear bare metal and religiously praise the cloud like some kind of savior.

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

#266

Post by tekknik »

angry_octet wrote: post #210
shsjxjbsbs wrote: post #196

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?

how will you attract the talent?

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

#267

Post by tekknik »

m463 wrote: post #232
jmartrican wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe it can make sense for a small company trying to scale where time is a factor using aws. 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.

not necessarily. for each of these “we build our own cloud” stories there’s quite a few more stories of large enterprises saving tons switching away from their own cloud. BOA themselves know their savings won’t last and they’ll be switching back. They’re already in negotiations

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

#268

Post by eesmith »

txcwpalpha wrote: post #257
learc83 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 r…

I don't think the renting example is that true. AFAIK auto manufacturers certainly do "rent" many of the factory machinery they use, and they certainly "rent" the maintenance contracts from the companies who service them (the big exception I'm aware of being Toyota, which makes their own factory robotics). In other examples, many airlines do lease airplanes, and even among the airlines that do own the planes, they st…

Could you clarify "AFAIK auto manufacturers certainly do "rent" many of the factory machinery they use, and they certainly "rent" the maintenance contracts from the companies who service them (the big exception I'm aware of being Toyota, which makes their own factory robotics)."?

Rental only makes sense if there is a marketplace for used machines. Eg, planes and plane engines are components that aren't really tied to one place or company. (The "that aren't easily replaceable" from the parent post.)

But industrial robots for car manufacturing seems like rather specific hardware. If, say, the Ford plant in Claycomo, Missouri no longer needs a machine for making the F-150, who is going to rent it? How is rental a better cost-savings for Ford than buying the machine and later selling it?

I tried looking this up, but failed. The closest I found was that "over half of industrial robot purchases in North America have been made by automakers" at https://www.robotics.org/blog-article.cfm/The-History-of-Rob... .

Also, '"rent" the maintenance contracts' doesn't make sense to me. I sell maintenance contracts to my customers, I don't rent them, and I don't understand what "rent" could even mean in that context.

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

#269

Post by greglindahl »

weberc2 wrote: post #261
greglindahl wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One hopes you're not arguing that companies shouldn't bother trying to figure out if they're in the 95% or the 5%.

No, it wouldn’t make sense for me to make the 95/5 distinction only to prescribe a 100/0 response. My post was a call for sober judgment, which is admittedly not very popular here.

Making up opinions and then arguing against them is not popular here.

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

#270

Post by dodobirdlord »

eesmith wrote: post #268
txcwpalpha wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the renting example is that true. AFAIK auto manufacturers certainly do "rent" many of the factory machinery they use, and they certainly "rent" the maintenance contracts from the companies who service them (the big exception I'm aware of being Toyota, which makes their own factory robotics). In other examples, many airlines do lease airplanes, and even among the airlines that do own the planes, they st…

Could you clarify "AFAIK auto manufacturers certainly do "rent" many of the factory machinery they use, and they certainly "rent" the maintenance contracts from the companies who service them (the big exception I'm aware of being Toyota, which makes their own factory robotics)."? Rental only makes sense if there is a marketplace for used machines. Eg, planes and plane engines are components that aren't really tied to…

The difference between renting and purchasing gets murky (sure, not literally) when you are dealing with sensitive hardware that you rely on but cannot maintain yourself. Such systems usually require frequent maintenance by the supplier. Sure, you could end your maintenance contracts, but then the systems you have purchased will very rapidly become useless. The up-front cost of hardware is often very small compared to the ongoing cost of maintenance contracts, and so the relationship ends up looking a lot like rental.

The parent comment mentions that Delta rents their airplane engines. I imagine that they have the capability to do general maintenance on the engines, but that the engines need to be periodically sent back to the supplier (probably GE or Rolls-Royce) for a teardown, safety inspection, and rebuild. Without regular inspections an engine can't be flown, and is essentially worthless. Not much point in actually owning the engine if you can't use it.

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