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The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

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Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#21

Post by SoftTalker »

sgt101 wrote: post #13

Look - if you can optimise your workload over a capital cycle cloud is not for you. Especially if you are a technology company and have the bandwidth to deal with servers and ISV's properly. If you are a changing, growing, non-technology company then cloud is the place you should be. You will get screwed by Oracle, you will get screwed by Accenture. You will not be able to optimise your workload and you may as well g…

Good luck getting the time of day from Oracle or Accenture if you are not already quite a large established company. Not that you want it anyway though.

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#22

Post by renewiltord »

SoftTalker wrote: post #21
sgt101 wrote: post #13

Look - if you can optimise your workload over a capital cycle cloud is not for you. Especially if you are a technology company and have the bandwidth to deal with servers and ISV's properly. If you are a changing, growing, non-technology company then cloud is the place you should be. You will get screwed by Oracle, you will get screwed by Accenture. You will not be able to optimise your workload and you may as well g…

Good luck getting the time of day from Oracle or Accenture if you are not already quite a large established company. Not that you want it anyway though.

Oracle was willing to talk to us and the max we would have paid them would have been $10 m / year.

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#23

Post by p1necone »

asah wrote: post #19

this makes no sense: can individual companies operate computing infrastructure more efficiently than cloud providers? if not, then instead of migrating just negotiate.

I think the biggest thing is that the minimum extra spend if you want in house managed infra is basically the salary of a full time sysadmin + hardware costs.

You can pay for a lot of cloud resources for that much, even when the cloud resources are massively overpriced compared to what you could manage if you had more scale.

The only other alternative is finding someone who's good enough at it to make that full time sysadmin job just a small part of their "actual" job responsibilities, but that person is pretty hard to find.

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#25

Post by simonebrunozzi »

Martin Casado is one of the smartest people I've met in my career in IT (AWS, VMware, etc).

This phrase is key:

"You’re crazy if you don’t start in the cloud; you’re crazy if you stay on it"

Perhaps I'd say that "you're crazy if you keep all your IT on it, as you scale".

There's still a case to be made for a small % of your workloads in the cloud. The flexibility is priceless. But for everything else, there's a well managed on-prem.

Side note: interesting how, after Mark Andreessen's disastrous post on techno-optimism a few days ago, I approached the reading of this article with rolled eyes and low expectations. Seeing Marting Casado as the author immediately changed it, however.

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#27

Post by codemac »

It's my hardcore held belief that the cloud industry could wildly be disrupted if it was easy enough to order 5 year capacity contracts. Then AWS / GCP etc would be left with just the elastic demand, rather than the inelastic profit center.

However - this would take a huge amount of upfront investment, have high risks for black swan events against 5y contracts without crypto-style escrow, and I have been unsuccessful pitching this direction in elevators to folks, which makes me think I don't have a visceral enough idea.

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#28

Post by vb-8448 »

asah wrote: post #19

this makes no sense: can individual companies operate computing infrastructure more efficiently than cloud providers? if not, then instead of migrating just negotiate.

Here we go, the biggest success of AWS is making people believe there's no alternative.

- there are a lot of companies that nowadays operates their computing infrastructure.

- there is a lot of space in the middle, you are not forced to choose just over full self-host and full-cloud, there is colocation, hosting, providers like hertzner, digital ocean and so on.

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#29

Post by bob1029 »

codemac wrote: post #27

It's my hardcore held belief that the cloud industry could wildly be disrupted if it was easy enough to order 5 year capacity contracts. Then AWS / GCP etc would be left with just the elastic demand, rather than the inelastic profit center. However - this would take a huge amount of upfront investment, have high risks for black swan events against 5y contracts without crypto-style escrow, and I have been unsuccessful…

5 years is a really long time on most types of B2B contracts. Especially ones with very thorough operational considerations bound to technology changing over time.

Consider how much premiums would be on $TSLA put options that expire in 2028.

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#30

Post by calimoro78 »

sgt101 wrote: post #14
senderista wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS is vastly more profitable than Amazon's retail business.

It is now. It wasn't in the past. It wouldn't be if they had to compete with providers that also wanted to compete.

AWS was first to market for many years, and their margins were always higher than ecommerce retail (and that's easy to believe, since retail often runs on 1% margins)
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