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FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

datacenterdynamics.com

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Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#551

Post by whatever1 »

appletrotter wrote: post #494
whatever1 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly because tsp variants are exponentially combinatorial we solve them with a strict time limit and use the best found solution. So for practical applications they are constant time.

> So for practical applications they are constant time. So they should be able to handle all of this on a raspberry pi, if the size of the input has no effect on processing time.

Yep a raspberry pi can give you A solution.

It is not difficult to find a solution to routing problems, the difficult part is to get probably near optimal solution (<1% optimality gap).

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#552

Post by appletrotter »

whatever1 wrote: post #551
appletrotter wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So for practical applications they are constant time. So they should be able to handle all of this on a raspberry pi, if the size of the input has no effect on processing time.

Yep a raspberry pi can give you A solution. It is not difficult to find a solution to routing problems, the difficult part is to get probably near optimal solution (<1% optimality gap).

So it scales with optimality but not size?

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#553

Post by smn1234 »

bhewes wrote: post #395
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…

At least in Oil and Gas. Servers moved back into the personal towers for the first time in a decade. Latency issues.

AWS Outposts ?

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#554

Post by jollybean »

kragen wrote: post #484
jollybean wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are doing the rational thing and there is no going back. 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 'b…

Ford and GM and Freightliner are not in a position to use price discrimination to confiscate FedEx's entire profits; if they try to sell trucks to FedEx at an inflated price, FedEx can just buy the same trucks from dealers, or buy them used, or buy GM trucks instead of Freightliner trucks. By contrast, generally speaking, cloud providers are in an excellent position to use price discrimination to extract the entire s…

So 100% yes, AWS has much more power in the value chain than Ford. But not really.

Especially to the extent that special services are not leveraged, then there are cheaper alternatives. A lot of IT is just 'instances' not 'fancy cloud queues'.

AWS pricing is very transparent and people can make the decisions they want. Generally speaking, AWS does not price discriminate on the basis of 'business model' and their margins are meaningless with respect to the overall business efforts of a Big Co.

I mean - unless you are doing big AI crunching, or 'free hosting content' - then frankly the AWS bill is not going to be a huge line item relative to overall operating costs.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#555

Post by Aperocky »

tbrownaw wrote: post #218
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…

Someone, somewhere, has to actually buy the computers. "Only pay for what you use" isn't magic, whatever fraction actually gets used (across all customers) has to end up paying for the whole computer. Taxis are "only pay for what you use", but owning your own car is often cheaper (even if you only use it, what, 1/12 of the day?) and more convenient.

> Taxis are "only pay for what you use"

Taxis are not scalable, you can't make one human drive 100 taxis. Meanwhile you can add entire new data centers with barely any extra burden on the software teams that manage them.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#556

Post by Aperocky »

filereaper wrote: post #189

Its weird to have companies say they're moving from Mainframes to the Cloud. 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 yo…

> you call IBM

you don't need to call AWS. Negotiate a blanket deal and do whatever you need. Run whatever you want. Unsure? Check billing page.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#557

Post by whatever1 »

appletrotter wrote: post #552
whatever1 wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep a raspberry pi can give you A solution. It is not difficult to find a solution to routing problems, the difficult part is to get probably near optimal solution (<1% optimality gap).

So it scales with optimality but not size?

It scales with the number of feasible routes for the particular problem instance you are looking at.

The issue is that there are exponentially many of them and you cannot easily rule out that there is no better solution than the one you have on hand.

That is why we solve these problems for as long as possible with as many resources as possible.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#558

Post by spr93 »

chrisseaton wrote: post #44
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…

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…

Your airplane analogy is apt, but it cuts the other way.

In fact, FedEx likes to buy out Boeing facilities so that they're not "completely reliant" on Boeing for anything.[1]

As for the more general cloud v. on-prem debate, I usually don't like analogies, but the plane analogy is good because jets and logistics-management systems are two things that FedEx needs to handle extremely well to compete.

So, what does FedEx actually do wrt jets?

FedEx both owns and leases them. It mostly owns them outright. Its owned jets are a mix of new-ish to very old (think DC-9s). It also leases and some financing magic (such as some big lease agreements for new 777s a couple years ago).

The reason is that FedEx generally gets excess value from owning rather than leasing, but there are some circumstances where leasing makes sense.

Same goes for "cloud" deployments. The correct answers to cloud "versus" on prem for large organizations like FedEx - "it depends," "that's a false dichotomy," and "it's almost certainly a mix of both" - are neither interesting nor simple, and so those answers don't get execs' attention...or headlines.

For FedEx to brag about taking an extreme position on cloud deployment is breathtakingly foolish. If I were an investor, I'd want to hear something like, "Based on a careful analysis, we've decided to shift certain specific operations to cloud-based systems. We plan to maintain control over the infrastructure and operations of mission-critical systems that have demonstrated resilience." (I'm assuming the latter are systems like the financial institutions rely on, where purpose-built stuff like mainframes using IMS have demonstrated near-zero downtime and darn-near-bug-free software for decades, because FedEx, like banks, needs to handle lots of simultaneous transactions in real time without error or deadlock.)

[1] Example: https://www.ch-aviation.com/portal/news/102874-fedex-to-take...

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#559

Post by pauljurczak »

cs702 wrote: post #36
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…

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 they will gently depart under their beautiful golden parachutes. What a racket.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#560

Post by nix23 »

jeffbee wrote: post #539
nix23 wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I expect none of them to be faulty So you don't even test the car's, you just expect that the tire pressure is correct, tank is full? Expect that something "just" works is exactly why pilots have checklist's. Expectations are the main point for disappointments, you would never do that with software right?

The point, which you seem so dedicated to avoiding, is that "in the cloud" these steps are not my problem. Inspecting a literal shipload of computers for subtle defects is a pain in the ass. Amazon does it for me. When I get on an airplane I do not personally have to run the checklists. The airline does it for me.

>The point, which you seem so dedicated to avoiding

Not true the point was you pay for it (cloud), or you do it yourself (but then do it right, and not like a amateur who build's his first "gaming-pc").

And if you do it yourself you can still be very much competitive vs cloud.

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