Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 321 posts

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

#301

Post by mcv »

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…

If you work at a bank that uses real cloud services (AWS and Azure in my case), they still lock down most of the options. They want control, ease of maintenance, and most of all: auditability. More options creates more overhead. Simple is good.

I did recently wonder if it made sense for banks to put all their stuff on other people's computers, instead of maintaining their own, but for the bank I work at, the old on-premise systems are maintained by IBM and ridiculously restrictive, so either AWS or Azure is already a massive improvement.

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

#302

Post by mcv »

julienfr112 wrote: post #271
nwallin wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I was surprised by how many IT employee there are in banks. But please, provide your own estimation.

Having worked at several banks, I would not be surprised at all if a 200k employee bank had 50,000 developers.

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

#303

Post by mcv »

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.

Why not? It's a lot, but I don't see this as an unreasonable number.

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

#304

Post by mcv »

bloody-crow wrote: post #79

> The bank, which has a $10 billion annual tech budget Am I the only one completely befuddled by this number? What the fuck are they doing with these money and 200k servers? These are facebook numbers. For a bank. What?

> " What the fuck are they doing with these money and 200k servers? These are facebook numbers. For a bank. What?"

Are you surprised that a an organisation handling billions of real money, millions or billions of financial transactions, and decades worth of legacy systems, can make do with only as little in servers and software development as a social network?

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

#305

Post by mcv »

grantseltzer wrote: post #95

I'm not so convinced how great of a job they did.Bank of America has by far the worst user experience I've ever seen. I had an experience recently where I changed my password, and after 2 days my new password stopped working and my old one did.

That's not good, but it's also only one of the many, many things a bank does, though. The most important one is keeping the money safe of course. It's entirely possible for a bank to do some things right and other things wrong.

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

#306

Post by amenod »

shrubble wrote: post #99
api wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody ever got fired for using AWS.

I am not at liberty to say the company name, but i do directly know of one person at a director level who was fired for using AWS. They turned on encryption for an option and did not realize the huge price difference between the encrypted and unencrypted option meant $9000 per day in additional charges. After 1 month (30 days) this came to light, and he was fired.

Yes, this happens with AWS. Controlling costs is a very important part of using any cloud, let alone AWS where the charges are... not as transparent as one would wish. :)

EDIT: btw, he was not fired for using AWS, he was fired for making unnecessary costs.

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

#307

Post by kthejoker2 »

bonesss wrote: post #292
kthejoker2 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can confirm, I'd say 20-30% of all Azure features come directly from the product teams' Partner Advisory Council (read: top customers) meetings. Like "snap your fingers" implementation.

And what's the alternative? Losing your biggest customers because you couldn't be assed to put a new button on some load-balancer configuration? Of course, for small or medium customers whose finger snaps are ignored... WYSIWYG. The roadblocks in not-your cloud are still your roadblocks.

Sorry, I guess it wasn't clear that I wasn't complaining or anything, just confirming the facts on the ground.

But (in a vacuum) when developing a solution to serve diverse needs and stakeholders, the HiPPO effect is definitely an anti-pattern.

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

#308

Post by pmart123 »

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…

Most medium size companies still would be using a data center provider today to handle the server/hardware maintenance and security. I think it comes down more to how likely is a workload going to change or interact with cloud services or api’s. If you have a CRM system used by a 15 person sales team growing one person a year, it probably is cheaper to self host in some ways. At the same time, if it goes down, someone internally needs to fix it. If all the sudden you want to run some data analytics project on the prospect and customer data, potentially the project is road blocked if more server space needs to be provisioned, etc.

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

#309

Post by mysidia »

tekknik wrote: post #263
hnick wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can use financing arrangements to avoid dropping the money all at once -- for example: A service provider offers you a monthly subscription or "lease-to-own deal" where you sign a contract to buy the software or hardware in exchange for monthly payments to be made over a period of time; that could be indefinite, or you become the owner of the hardware after the end of its useful life. Or just go to a bank, and they will be happy to create a loan and write a check out to your vendor for the lump sum, and so you are only responsible for making required monthly payments of the interest plus any principal, etc, required by the contract.

So no... not necessarily... CapEx is not necessarily paid out all at once. So the accounting ought to be the same whether its a CapEx purchase under a Subscription Agreement/Loan, or if its an "OpEx" payment for 1 month of services.

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

#310

Post by mysidia »

dboreham wrote: post #256
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

Renting bare metal is exactly how the business worked prior to the rise of EC2. e.g Rackspace, Linode. You can rent vs buy at any level : rent only machines, rent a 1/2 a rack, rent a full rack, rent a cage, rent 1/2 a dc, and so on. Same with connectivity: you can plug your machines into a lan managed by the hosting provider, or run your own routers and peer with their in-house ISP, or you can buy peering directly i…

If you rent the backhoe... make sure you call before you dig and don't cut one of my fibers, please.
Post reply on HN