Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

panarky wrote: post #3

Bad title. They didn't switch from AWS to private cloud. They consolidated 60 data centers with 200k servers to 23 data centers and 70k servers.

And it's still cheaper than public cloud. Look at cloud provider margins, that profit is your opportunity at this scale (and BoA, JPM, etc are big enough to run their own technology teams, and do, having worked with them). Fat public cloud margins come from somewhere.

This isn't a religious argument. Some workloads are fine on prem (known load profiles, shed infrequent traffic spikes instead of bursting), some need cloud (Netflix.com, remember all of their video content streams from their own CDN hardware), it's ensuring you're making the decision in an objective way. Sort of, but not quite, similar to making software budget and timeline estimates.

If software is eating the world, and every company is turning into a software company, why would you be surprised that orgs above a certain size wouldn't also turn into an infrastructure company? You don't have to compete against Amazon, you just need to satisfy your engineering needs for your vertical and the software that drives it. Amazon needs to be everything to everyone.

Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#5

Post by sairahul82 » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 4:47 PM UTC

If you know your traffic well, private cloud saves a lot of money. Few years back i bet hybrid clouds will take over and for some reason it did not happen. I still believe hybrid cloud is the solution for mid size and up companies. You definitely need cloud provides for handling traffic spikes.

Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#6

Post by reilly3000 » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 4:48 PM UTC

Is this a story about virtualization? I fail to see the distinction between data center and private cloud in this context.

Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#7

Post by thorwasdfasdf » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 4:55 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #4

panarky wrote: post #3

Bad title. They didn't switch from AWS to private cloud. They consolidated 60 data centers with 200k servers to 23 data centers and 70k servers.

And it's still cheaper than public cloud. Look at cloud provider margins, that profit is your opportunity at this scale (and BoA, JPM, etc are big enough to run their own technology teams, and do, having worked with them). Fat public cloud margins come from somewhere. This isn't a religious argument. Some workloads are fine on prem (known load profiles, shed infrequent traffic spikes instead of bursting), some need c…

but why aren't those fat profit margins being competed away by competitors?

Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#8

Post by awaisraad » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 4:55 PM UTC

adventured wrote: post #2

Outline: https://outline.com/nDEM3d

Thanks, I couldn't read it because of the pay wall but at this link I could read it without any hassle.

Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#9

Post by rapsey » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 4:55 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #4

panarky wrote: post #3

Bad title. They didn't switch from AWS to private cloud. They consolidated 60 data centers with 200k servers to 23 data centers and 70k servers.

And it's still cheaper than public cloud. Look at cloud provider margins, that profit is your opportunity at this scale (and BoA, JPM, etc are big enough to run their own technology teams, and do, having worked with them). Fat public cloud margins come from somewhere. This isn't a religious argument. Some workloads are fine on prem (known load profiles, shed infrequent traffic spikes instead of bursting), some need c…

Besides some edge cases where you actually need elastic scaling, public cloud is always more expensive.

Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#10

Post by rolltiide » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 4:55 PM UTC

reilly3000 wrote: post #6

Is this a story about virtualization? I fail to see the distinction between data center and private cloud in this context.

I was going to explain how there's no difference but then I thought about the more facetious terminology

cloud - someone else's computers

private cloud - someone else's computers that you own???? or that nobody else uses, but in this context you also own???