181–190 of 573 posts
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That seems to be a common take on HN - cloud is too expensive. I'm curious whether the folks claiming that have any data center ops experience. Because, personally, I'd rather retire than deal with Dell, HP, Cisco, fibers, cooling issues, physical security, hardware failling... And that's just the hardware. Then you still need to pay VMWare for a decent virtualization platform, monitoring tools, etc.... Seriously, no…
To a company you need to pay those costs no matter what. If the AC breaks at 3am it neds to be fixed. It doesn't matter if you have your own HVAC people on sight 24x7, your own people on call to service it, a local HVAC service to come in, or you outsource the entire operations and so you have no idea how that is handled. In the end the important part of this story is that whatever you are doing with the AC continues…
The downside for saving the costs is that you're losing control with every step taken away: as soon as you go into a datacenter of any kind, you simply cannot call up a HVAC company and offer them 100k in hard cash if they're showing up in the next 60 minutes and fix the issue. With a colo DC you can usually go and show up there to see if the HVAC, UPS and other systems are appropriate to your needs, but with one of the big cloud providers you have to trust their word that they are doing stuff correctly.
I've seen two mainframe "replacements" fail to either retire the mainframe, OR produce an alternative system which people like. Has any Fortune 500 company successfully "retired" their mainframe?
I've seen it. It was essentially four steps: - Build middleware (REST API endpoint) in front of the mainframe that was 1:1 mainframe functions. It initially does nothing except auth and routing. - Re-write/migrate all other software from using the mainframe directly to using the new middleware. - Work to further restrict anything directly connecting to the mainframe aside from the middleware, including staff's termin…
There was a lot more complexity that that, but that's the gist of it. By the time I left, my team had carved out the bulk of the mainframe's services and had stood up over 50 microservices.
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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 Microsof…
> 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. I don't know why I have to explain this every time "data center vs cloud" discussions come up, but if you reduce risks, then you are in effect saving money.
I'm quite sure if you take managing your IT infrastructure as seriously as you take your core business, you can definitely save tons of money by handrolling your infrastructure.
There's also a big difference between doing so 10 years ago versus now, with all the enterprise grade open source solutions to infrastructure challenges.
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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…
That seems to be a common take on HN - cloud is too expensive. I'm curious whether the folks claiming that have any data center ops experience. Because, personally, I'd rather retire than deal with Dell, HP, Cisco, fibers, cooling issues, physical security, hardware failling... And that's just the hardware. Then you still need to pay VMWare for a decent virtualization platform, monitoring tools, etc.... Seriously, no…
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…
> rent all information infrastructure Most of them were renting most of the infra anyway: - Co-location (physical space rented) - Managed service to keep the lights on (power, back-up generators) - Leased hardware that gets replaced every 3 years - Managed service for switch, firewall, etc. monitoring - ISP, back-up generators, etc. > but that will likely be many, many years down the road They're going to explain to…
If you are big enough to have your own datacenter, you are paying Amazon enough to buy that much physical space, power, bandwidth, IT staff, etc. plus funding Bezos' trips to space.
There's a justifiable niche where you're too small to justify running your own server/below the need of one full-time IT staff where the cloud makes sense, and startups temporarily benefit from the ability to rapidly scale on cloud platforms. But any Fortune 500 transitioning to the cloud is literally just taking their money and burning it, because the alleged cost savings of efficiencies of scale are being completely absorbed by the cloud provider's profit margins. And they're still going to end up paying their own IT staff to handle the cloud management in addition to (by proxy) paying the cloud provider's IT staff to manage the hardware.
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It's not only about size, there's also workloads to take into consideration. Take FedEx, their operations are highly dynamic - per day but also per period. The number of packages sent, and being transported, vary greatly between a random Tuesday 15:00 and the weeks before holidays. In such a scenario, with your own infrastructure, you need to overprovision, by a lot, to be able to handle the heaviest load possible, a…
The cost does not scale linearly with the #of packages. A table with 1 entry is not cheaper than a table with 1 million entries. The same routing algorithms have to run either they have one package or 1 million packages. Plus you need to keep the history of the operations for months if not years (meaning that you will store both holiday and random Tuesday data anyway). So where is this flexible cost exactly?
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...
The Mainframe is a sort of cloud, each one has usually double the spare capacity and you call IBM to unlock it.
The cost of running a Mainframe is measured in terms of MIPS based on amount of compute used and there's compute reserved for offloading things like JITs (zAAPS). Essentially a version of cloud compute costs.
I can understand if you're locked into COBOL with EBCDIC and can't find talent, but Z runs freaking Ubuntu now! I know IBM works furiously on modern ecosystem support.
Not shill for IBM, but what exactly is it that they're expecting to be so different from their cloud migrations? Or is everyone here caught up in the "Mainframe old" falsehood.
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 Microsof…
And exchange it with dependability risks
> you're not getting strangled by any Oracle contracts
Unless you go to the Oracle cloud
> Your system administrators department is not gonna block any innovative employee initiatives
They're still there, aren't they?