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

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#461

Post by ocdtrekkie » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 9:32 PM UTC

ozim wrote: post #454

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a couple comments pointing this out, but that's not unique to on-prem: Cloud providers are also buying hardware from vendors, employing contractors, buying or renting facilities, hiring consultants, etc. All of that you are going to pay for either way. The cloud just offers an additional middleman that also gets a profit margin.

Yeah but you pay one invoice instead of 100 invoices, you have one sales representative OK maybe a couple to deal with instead of 100s. You get your support in one place instead of Hodge pogge of ... yeah we rent server from X but software that runs on it is from Y and in reality provider Z is support so now C has to agree for physical access to the server and now align stars to get all 4 working together instead of…

Sure, you pay an Amazon employee to manage that for you instead of paying an employee of your own. Either way you're paying for that, and with the cloud you also pay for Bezos' spacecraft fantasies.

And you hope the Amazon employee makes decisions that are favorable to your business, even though they do not care about it.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#462

Post by cupofpython » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 9:32 PM UTC

thfuran wrote: post #445

kortilla wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they ultimately live materially better lives because of their position This is a bullshit reason based on jealousy, not reason. > when those actions can have a negative effect on those below them and even to the external environment This is the real reason it’s fair to be very critical of their maneuvers.

>This is a bullshit reason based on jealousy, not reason. Reality is not zero sum, but neither are resources infinite. Is it really bullshit to critique more thoroughly that to which more of the finite resources are dedicated?

>Is it really bullshit to critique more thoroughly that to which more of the finite resources are dedicated?

this kind of aligns with my point tbh. We give $10 critiques to million dollar positions as if they hold weight.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#463

Post by majewsky » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 9:42 PM UTC

infogulch wrote: post #437

floxy wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A new CEO was hired to take over a struggling company. The CEO who was stepping down met with him privately and presented him with three numbered envelopes. “Open these if you run into serious trouble,” he said. Well, six months later sales and profits were still way down and the new CEO was catching a lot of heat. He began to panic but then he remembered the envelopes. He went to his drawer and took out the first e…

Is this a quine where the processor is a CEO?

I think it's more like malware. A virus that spreads from CEO to CEO.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#464

Post by stanfordkid » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 9:47 PM 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…

Yeah but cloud infra is a competitive market with multiple players, it's not like they're going to just buy a monthly AWS contract. They will probably have a cloud migration strategy, multiple year fixed contract, and multi-cloud support.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#465

Post by mark_l_watson » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 9:50 PM 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…

I used to agree with your opinion. Then I worked as an engineering manager at Capital One (deep learning, not infrastructure) and I saw all of the good reasons they had to move to AWS.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#466

Post by magicalhippo » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 9:57 PM UTC

whatever1 wrote: post #142

sofixa wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not just routing. When a plane or truck arrives and is unloaded, thousands of packages have to be scanned, which triggers a cascade of messages to different systems. In addition to the routing and whatnot, customs declarations might have to be sent, track and trace gets updates (both from arrival scan and customs), there's billing etc. All this flurry of activity happens within an hour or so after the plane lands, and then it quiets down until the next plane or truck.

I could easily see FedEx can save money by dynamically scaling capacity to track the arrival of their planes or trucks.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#467

Post by shaman1 » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 9:59 PM 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…

Disagree, companies cannot focus on too many things at once and get them right. Better for them to focus on logistics, fleet, cargo, etc than investing in data centers. Staying in your area of competence usually yields the best results. Btw, as I was using FedEx for an international shipment, their IT services are abysmal and could use a shake-up.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#468

Post by bsder » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 10:06 PM UTC

dehrmann wrote: post #317

fires10 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You generally can not go from city water/sewage to on-prem for legal reasons. However, many are going on-prem with solar. I am going almost completely off-grid for cost and SLA requirements.

What's interesting is people seem really excited about installing rooftop solar, but I see fewer companies building collectors in places with cheap land and ample sun. That tells me part of the selling point of rooftop solar is it feels good, and the economics might not actually work.

The economics favors distributed storage rather than generation.

I worked in a building during rolling blackouts in California. The Tesla Powerwall on the building was "screaming" (ultrasonic harmonics from piezo components) 24/7. The security guy actually came to get me to ask if the thing was going to explode.

Clearly, the building owner was load shifting and making quite a bit of money from it.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#469

Post by nix23 » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 10:19 PM UTC

linker3000 wrote: post #458

nix23 wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had some metaldust and it was from bearings, but op said something flakes and then microscopic particles. Particles = bearings, flakes = chassis or even stickers, but anyway just because of transport you dont trow a server into production without testing and inspection. I am beeing smug about not testing your hardware as you do it with software....shitty testing is shitty testing, counts for software hardware firmw…

I heard tale of a banking centre that had a diesel generator installed by a local company. Load and simulated power failure tests all passed. Then some time later there was a total power cut and that's when they realised the generator had an electric start wired to the mains supply.

And there is also the true story when "someone" forgot to fill the tank after 5 years of regular monthly tests, then the real thing happened.

> had an electric start wired to the mains supply.

But that's a good one, humans being humans...but it worked every time before today ;))

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#470

Post by nharada » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 10:22 PM UTC

IHLayman wrote: post #150

pid-1 wrote: post #130

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…

ML workloads definitely cost a lot of money. Even for a preemptible VM, A100 GPUs cost $0.88/hr/GPU. That's $624 a month for a single GPU and only the 40GB model. Want a dedicated 8 GPU machine in the cloud to do training with? That'll run you around 16 grand a month. Do that for 2 years and you may as well have bought the device. Want to do 16/24/40 GPU training? Good luck getting dedicated cloud machines with netwo…

The ability to scale up experiments is really nice in cloud. In my experience you need to be quite large before you’re using your own GPUs at a utilization percentage that saves money while still having capacity for large one off experiments.