Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah but that’s almost my point; 20k/m is an order of magnitude less than 10 million/month.
Technically, 2.5 orders of magnitude.
Thank you. I need to get better at using orders of magnitude.
Is the Cloud Recession-Proof?
111–116 of 116 posts
Re: Is the Cloud Recession-Proof?
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm shocked that some middle manager with half a technical head on their shoulders didn't use this as a VP play before this; surely, "I saved the company 120m a year with no downstream consequences to yada yada" would have been worth it for someone somewhere to climb the ladder.
Why would you, if in good times you can enlarge your own budget/headcount/importance/... just by increasing budget no questions asked, that's a safer way ahead. You risk devaluing your own position in the company for an uncertain gain...
I was obviously being slightly sarcastic. I wouldn't want to personally work that way. I do believe that might be quite an effective strategy if one's goal were climbint the corporate ladder.
Re: Is the Cloud Recession-Proof?
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's "easy" to do this, but it's also just as "easy" for your service to fall over when you do it wrong. Capacity planning and performance engineering is a lost art in a world where you would simply throw money at the problem until it went away.
It's not that hard (I've done this recently for clients). If your traffic is 90% of normal for a few months, scaling down with load makes a lot of sense, then you can scale back up when ready. There are also autoscaling solutions like serverless.
This is true for simple services. It's different when you're dealing with something like a Cassandra or Elasticsearch cluster, where the system isn't stateless and scaling up takes some time for re-balancing.
Re: Is the Cloud Recession-Proof?
#114Definitely not. My company has been drastically scaling back our AWS spend and I mean about a $10m+ a month reduction. I guarantee we're not alone. All the gee-whiz resume-driven-development type project infrastructure was the first to go lol.
"Cloud Scale" always promotes that you can scale up easily, but that also means you can scale down easily
Well, that's the marketing story, at least.
In my reality, a large part of my programmers' effort is spent battling various "capacity exceeded" AWS errors.
Re: Is the Cloud Recession-Proof?
#115Definitely not. My company has been drastically scaling back our AWS spend and I mean about a $10m+ a month reduction. I guarantee we're not alone. All the gee-whiz resume-driven-development type project infrastructure was the first to go lol.
Pretty sure a typo and the million wanted to be a kilo? $120m/year for apparently unnecessary IT capacity would be hard to hide even in government contracts...
I once saw a major west coast health insurer purchase $50MM+ in hardware to solve what could have been at most a couple million software problem. In fact, had they negotiated well they might have been able to pawn the whole problem off on their vendor.
Re: Is the Cloud Recession-Proof?
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not that hard (I've done this recently for clients). If your traffic is 90% of normal for a few months, scaling down with load makes a lot of sense, then you can scale back up when ready. There are also autoscaling solutions like serverless.
This is true for simple services. It's different when you're dealing with something like a Cassandra or Elasticsearch cluster, where the system isn't stateless and scaling up takes some time for re-balancing.
Sure, it won't apply to all services, particularly datastores are best left alone, but if you need a quite few web workers say which sit in front of your search or db to service millions of users, and can cut that in half during low traffic times, you may save significant money, as the user pram above has noted.