FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes • Hacker News Board

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#91

Post by kragen » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 11:39 AM UTC

tpetry wrote: post #54

chrisseaton wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can say the same thing for hundreds of parts of a company like FedEx. For example FedEx flies Boeing jets. It's completely reliant on Boeing for parts for those jets. Presumably Boeing can charge whatever it wants. Your company is always going to be reliant on other suppliers and contracts. Unless you're planning on building your own independent country in some location that has all the natural resources you need…

> For example FedEx flies Boeing jets. It's completely reliant on Boeing for parts for those jets. Presumably Boeing can charge whatever it wants. Nobody said that FedEx should build their own server hardware. And that's what you are comparing it too. FedEx could just buy server appliances from e.g. Dell (buying the Boeing jet) and operating it. Because paying some other air cargo company will eat a lot of their marg…

Boeing jets are a lot more like IBM mainframes than they are like Dell servers, which are still mostly commodity.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#92

Post by dzhiurgis » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 11:41 AM UTC

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #40

Ekaros wrote: post #30

Where are they using all of these data centers and mainframes? That is they are spending at least 400 million to do what exactly? To me that seems like rather high figure in any case for their sites and logistics...

Yep... A couple of million of packages daily + tracking a fleet of vehicles, client facing site, apis for their tracking and courrier services/devices plus some internal services (billing etc...).. this seems like it would fit on a few racks, not nearly 400million, or whatever the full number is (since 400m are just the savings). But yeah... old company, they might still have stuff written in cobol virtualized somewh…

With 300k employees you can expect them to have thousands of disparate services that will likely get rewritten part of such migration

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#93

Post by tinco » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 11:44 AM UTC

baud147258 wrote: post #12

Are they really going to save 400 m$, or was it the figure "promised" by the shop that will handle the migration?

There's not a company in the world that spends more than $1m annually on cloud costs that has saved money by doing so. You don't go to the cloud to save money, you go to the cloud to reduce technological risk.

If you go to the cloud you don't need to fire anyone for choosing IBM, you're not getting strangled by any Oracle contracts, you're not gonna lose all your data because of security holes in your use of Microsoft products.

You're also not going to be dealing with downtime because you couldn't find staff talented off to properly configure your Cisco networking equipment.

Your system administrators department is not gonna block any innovative employee initiatives because of the strain maintaining more projects puts on a deployment stack carrying 150 different projects but which was architected to solve a single business goal 15 years ago.

Imagine being a 67 yr old manager who just wants to be in the business of getting letters printed on tree pulp from Bumfuck, Idaho delivered to Louisville, Alabama reasonably effectively. Knowing nothing about computers or information technology, imagine the insane stack of perfect decisions that have to be made to get the IT infrastructure of a company like FedEX running.

Not saying going to the cloud is the best decision. Not even saying it's the decision I would make. But it does sound very enticing to just have all of those problems go away by throwing a couple hundred million dollars a year at Google, Microsoft or Amazon (btw lol if they go with Oracle or IBM instead).

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#94

Post by masswerk » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 11:45 AM UTC

cs702 wrote: post #55

noobermin wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing there are no other voices in the room pushing back against this. It really makes you wonder how companies even function at all, much less make money. Being so short sided never ends well.

Actually, I don't think the decision is that shortsighted in this case. It could work out pretty well for a decade or longer. IMHO FedEx is likely to have a good run before the costs and risks of this decision start outweighing its benefits.

However, when the situation starts to become unbearable, how long will it take to rebuild the infrastructure and source talent? Another decade? Adding the startup costs for any possible rebuild, you're apt for a substantial net loss. So you're probably going to shy away from such a reintegration, while losses accumulate further, until this becomes unsustainable, putting the entire corporation at risk.

(The wise thing to do to mitigate financial impact may actually be starting the reintegration process right now.)

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#95

Post by jon-wood » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 11:47 AM UTC

Thorentis wrote: post #4

Is there any gain here aside from cost saving? Will this saving be passed on to the customer? ( laughs ). What happens when the inevitable AWS outage then causes a global shipping bottleneck? Have we still not learnt that having sovereignty is better than saving money? Has COVID taught us nothing? sigh

The immediate gains I can see are:

* In-house development teams have more agility in standing up new services, since they can just use EC2/ECS/one of the other 1500 container runtimes AWS has, rather than having to wait for someone to provision new physical servers for them.

* An extensive suite of complementary products are available from cloud providers, it's not just about being able to start a VM, in many cases you don't even need to because you've got Lambda, and the various managed services.

* Less training/hiring overhead, since people who can use AWS are pretty much a commodity at this point, whereas people who can manage a mainframe are an increasingly rare breed.

* Redundancy becomes easier. As does data locality, let's say Singapore declare all services delivered in Singapore must be hosted there. That's a lot easier to handle if you don't have to go and build/acquire a data centre first.

* The aforementioned 400 million dollars per year.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#96

Post by lr4444lr » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 11:47 AM UTC

kragen wrote: post #19

Ultimately companies that abdicate their informatics operations like this will give their profits to their data-center operators, who will be empowered to charge them whatever price they want. Because what's their BATNA? Migrating from Azure to AWS when Microsoft doesn't want to let them? Renting your information infrastructure is a great way to reduce startup costs, but down the road, that information infrastructure…

No, they could use several proprietary solutions that aren't "pay by the hour", that come with their own consultants as well as the physical infrastructure. Also, FedEx is not a customer that a big profit sucking outlet wants to lose by gouging rent. They have more leverage than you're giving them credit for.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#97

Post by sackerhews » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 11:47 AM UTC

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #29

rbanffy wrote: post #16

Reverend Mother Mohiam: Many men have tried Paul: They tried and failed? Reverend Mother Mohiam: They tried and died.

context is everything, reading that I thought it would be hilariously funny as an exchange in Father Ted.

Wow, this both a fantastic joke and could be used as a school book example of the importance of context.

Given of course that everyone would have watched Father Ted. But the world would be a better place if everyone did.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#98

Post by TheRealDunkirk » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 11:50 AM UTC

goindeep wrote: post #65

cs702 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without a doubt, a future generation of executives will revisit and reverse the decision to rent all information infrastructure, but that will likely be many, many years down the road. In the meantime, the current generation of executives who made this decision will look very smart for saving the company lots of money for a good number of years. And they stand to benefit personally from it. They're doing the rational…

I used to work with a very smart man that I'm sure was some kind of secret genius. He's was that sort of tech gofer. Hardware, software, didn't matter, if there was a problem he'd solve it. Sort of guy you'd see carrying a thick ass SQL book around because he 'needed to learn it' to solve just one little problem. He built whole entire solutions for the company I worked at in his spare time that the company once tried…

I'm 53, and I've worked for 3 Fortune 250's. Can confirm. I've seen this happen over and over again. Senior management makes some broad pronouncements, and the mid-level lieutenants have meetings with consultants, and then implement new, expensive projects that "will surely fix 'it' this time." Five to ten years later, after the dust settles, and we figure out that we've strapped YET ANOTHER LAYER of technical debt on top of everything else, and things are worse than ever. But at the height of the project, when everything is still rosy, the managers in charge update their resumes, and hit the bricks.

IN PARTICULAR, at one Fortune 250 (which no longer exists), we implemented OneWorld to replace the mainframe. After 7 years, we still had the mainframe, AND a badly-implemented version of OneWorld. Then the company got bought by another Fortune 250, moves were made to "commonize" the IT systems, and then the parent company sold everything. But I'm positive that everyone involved in the project to retire the mainframe made the project look very successful on their resumes.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#99

Post by jon-wood » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 11:50 AM UTC

ehnto wrote: post #9

joekrill wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The company is a known Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure customer.

Hard to say for certain. Companies that size often have many very independent operations run by separate internal departments. I have worked places with internal, AWS and Azure operations underway.

Where I am various parts of the business run workloads on AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. To some extent I think this sort of behaviour is encouraged by large corporates because it makes contract negotiations easier if you're able to wave in the direction of the other cloud providers you're using and suggest it wouldn't be too hard to migrate over to them.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#100

Post by lotsofpulp » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 11:50 AM UTC

transpute wrote: post #70

kragen wrote: post #19

Ultimately companies that abdicate their informatics operations like this will give their profits to their data-center operators, who will be empowered to charge them whatever price they want. Because what's their BATNA? Migrating from Azure to AWS when Microsoft doesn't want to let them? Renting your information infrastructure is a great way to reduce startup costs, but down the road, that information infrastructure…

https://twitter.com/cynicalsecurity/status/15407428422381281... > Clown Computing is an elegant, distributed, breach of trust. > Take customers, as many as you like, convince them to hand you all their data, the management of said data, the authentication and, while you are at it, the DNS. Oh, and they pay for it too! > If this was done in real life it would be called a robbery, possibly at gunpoint, definitely in br…

The transfer of various liabilities is omitted from the above tweets, which is clearly worth something to some people.