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

Post by julienfr112 » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 5:27 AM UTC

nwallin wrote: post #228

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…

> no os choice, no hardware choice, slow provisioning These are probably positives from large org internal perspective. "We want to switch x from y to z." "We can't. In fact we want to switch u from z to y." > If they have 50 000 IT employees BofA has 205k employees in 2019 as per Wikipedia. No way 1/4 of them are in IT.

Post by eesmith » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 6:11 AM UTC

dodobirdlord wrote: post #270

eesmith wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 6:17 AM UTC

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…

Post by StreamBright » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 6:21 AM UTC

weberc2 wrote: post #209

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…

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.

Post by hunter2_ » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 6:37 AM UTC

runT1ME wrote: post #162

dijit wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...