261–270 of 573 posts
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Do you trust FedEx to operate datacenters better than AWS or Microsoft?
If AWS is charging a 1000% markup on a bunch of stuff, you don't have to be as good as them to save money doing it yourself
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…
This isn't a one size fits all thing. For a company like FedEx I don't see the advantage of owning their own data centers. They just don't have the scaling challenges that would require that. Data centers or information infrastructure as you put it does't fall within the core competency of FedEx, so I don't think it's a fair comparison to say its like outsourcing upper management. I think its more fair to so that FedEx building their own datacenters is like building their own roads to deliver packages on.
For a company like Facebook or Google, the difference is clear. They need to handle such a high scale of traffic and volume of data that they need custom infrastructure to be able to scale efficiently at significantly reduced costs. The same reason it made sense for them to invest in building their own databases, because the existing options didn't meet the scaling requirements. FedEx won't realistically be needing their own database or infrastructure any time soon.
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
I'm not being facetious.
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…
This is permanent secular shift.
The advantages of the cloud are just starting to be realized.
That said, for some kinds of operations, they may want a lower cost cloud provider with a more basic stack.
Secondary operators of the world need to get together and start offering a standard stack for basic things so that people can wean off of Azure and AWS.
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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…
right now, they can't retain the people or afford the people to do this work. When you can go work elsewhere for more money you move. And, running a main frame isn't just having it, it's keeping the people running it, plus paying for the electricity and space. Depending where, the real-estate and energy prices are nuts in most places. And, the engineers are expensive right now, and the services are cheaper. It's not…
But how will the cloud providers avoid these trends? They won't. They will have to do the same thing as anyone else: pay more. And therefore charge more. There are economies of scale, but those savings are logarithmic and a company like FedEx is already pretty far out on the X axis.
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…
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…
And this is where people in my age range (20-30) will get to swoop in if we invest the next 10-20 years learning about and tinkering with server hardware.
I highly recommend it for everyone.
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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…
1000% this. HN loves to talk about Dropbox. I spent most of my (short, praise God) career at Dropbox diagnosing a fleet of dodgy database servers we bought from HPE. Turns out they were full of little flecks of metal inside. Thousands of em, full of iron filings. You think that kind of thing happens when you are an AWS customer? If you are sophisticated enough to engage an ODM, build your own facilities, and put hvac…
Like most startups, our management of the data center was pretty scrappy. Our CEO liked that kind of stuff, and we had a couple of network engineers that could be on call to fix overnight issues. It definitely wasn't a burden at the 50 employees size of company (and that includes field techs that actually installed fiber, dragged cable under the street, etc.)
We actually had some Linux servers in the datacenter. I don't know why, to be completely honest.
So overall my thought is that maybe use the cloud for your 1 person startup, but sometimes you need a datacenter only and it's not really rocket science. You're going to have downtime while someone drives to the datacenter. You're going to have downtime when us-east-1 explodes, too. To me, it's a wash.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
""Change gives the illusion of progress". I asked him what he meant and he responded with something to the effect of "They have the habit of changing big things every 5-10 years on purpose to make it look like they are productive, and to justify their own roles, one guy will come in and 'cut costs', the new guy after him will 'invest'". " That's deep and 100% makes sense, I can see how the cloud is both of these "thi…
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…
If you don't enjoy it then what were you doing working at a datacenter? I enjoyed server admin, "back in the day", when your servers were pets and not cattle. But of course we have to make tech just as expendable as our workers, business school demands it! What if your pet server gets hit by a digital bus?!
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…
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…
HNers need to get their heads around this: the economies of the could represent a fundamental, secular shift.
Imagine if Fedex designed and made their own delivery vehicles. Then they 'outsourced' that to Ford/GM. You might say 'look at Ford's amazing margins, look at the money being left on the table' - but in reality, it's still more cost effective to 'buy vehicles' the to 'DIY' them.
In the 'long run' those Azure/AWS margins will erode - and/or - the long tail will creep up on them. Basically data centers offering less, for less, and companies realizing they don't need the complexity of AWS do do basic things.
What that will look like is hard to say.
With hardware it meant 'pivot to Asia'.
Will this happen again? Chinese companies creating large data centres in the US with minimal staffing, monitored and operated out of China?
If we were not in a giant geostrategic kerfluffle with them, then yes, I would say that is the future. But given security issues etc. it's probably not.
Can India do that? Maybe.