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81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending

venturebeat.com

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Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending

#101

Post by carlmr »

godisdad wrote: post #76

The solution never tried: share the spoils of efficiency with your teams. Give them a percentage or even a few basis points of what they save back as charitable contributions to an organization of their choice. Watch how fast the bill will go down

>The solution never tried: share the spoils of efficiency with your teams.

Funny enough, for all the problems with studying business administration, they do teach this as part of the principal-agent problem. If the principal wants something done, and the agent has no incentive to do it, you need to give the agent some of the incentive so their interests are aligned with yours.

At the same time it's something you rarely see implemented by BA types, because they don't like to share.

Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending

#102

Post by carlmr »

vjk800 wrote: post #98
godisdad wrote: post #76

The solution never tried: share the spoils of efficiency with your teams. Give them a percentage or even a few basis points of what they save back as charitable contributions to an organization of their choice. Watch how fast the bill will go down

Do this and now you also have an incentive to first spend money frivolously so that "savings" can later be easily found.

You should not announce this and use the numbers half a year after the announcement.

Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending

#103

Post by AmericanChopper »

carlmr wrote: post #101
godisdad wrote: post #76

The solution never tried: share the spoils of efficiency with your teams. Give them a percentage or even a few basis points of what they save back as charitable contributions to an organization of their choice. Watch how fast the bill will go down

>The solution never tried: share the spoils of efficiency with your teams. Funny enough, for all the problems with studying business administration, they do teach this as part of the principal-agent problem. If the principal wants something done, and the agent has no incentive to do it, you need to give the agent some of the incentive so their interests are aligned with yours. At the same time it's something you rare…

You’re making a new problem by creating that incentive. What happens when engineers are financially incentivised to cut corners? Do you need to tax their incentive pay for service disruptions? How complicated would the system have to get before the ICs realise that resource allocation is actually a governance responsibility, and they’ve actually just been tasked with doing the CEOs job?

Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending

#104

Post by weberer »

POPOSYS wrote: post #62

Question 1: is it possible to run AWS / Google cloud with a fixed pre-paid monthly rate? Like e.g. "give me the most webservers for 1000$ / Month plus a Database". Question 2: does exist some kind of optimization-per-usecase service for such a fixed cost scenario? E.g. "Optimize for Website" or "Optimize for Database" and you can download a Terraform file?

1. Yes, its called reserved pricing. You have to enter a 1 year contract. Here's an example for EC2, which is Amazon's VPS offering. I assume other companies have similar systems

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/reserved-instances/pricin...

2. You can chose which type of machine you want to reserve as your servers. Some of them are optimized for memory (good for databases). Some for CPU, etc

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/

Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending

#105

Post by pugz »

gw99 wrote: post #74
bradleyjg wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how does it take a over week to answer the question? In my experience it takes azure support over a week to answer any question. Unless the question happens to be which person without a substantial update is taking over the case. You’ll get lots and lots of those answers.

If it's any consolation it's not much better on the AWS side. We are currently waiting for them to fix something which they recently broke but some dude is on holiday. I suspect he's the only dude who knows how it works. Even our account managers can't seem to brow beat anyone into fixing it. Someone else's computer has been painful and very expensive for our organisation so far. Escalating costs aren't even the wors…

Out of interest, what support tier are you on? Is it the Enterprise ($15k/month minimum) tier? I've found that AWS Support will resolve any non-critical issue within at most a few hours on that tier. (Our cloud spend was $1M/month)

Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending

#106

Post by noduerme »

abofh wrote: post #77
noduerme wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I manage one midsized company's set of cloud resources that I'm pretty sure could be reduced by 40% in cost or more if they were willing to take a 3 year advanced reserve. The problem is I can't get a handle on how much their infrastructure will or won't need to scale in the next three years, since they themselves don't know. There's always some new deal around the corner that would require scaling up. On top of that…

So there are three choices, essentially to argue over: - run on demand instances (maybe mix in spot) - run fargate instances (maybe mix in spot) - reserve them. Every company hates #3, but it's usually the best choice if you can't go spot - you can swap them within the family for size, use them for baseline, it's fine. You're incorporated right? So if you fold, it's just another debt on the pile, stop worrying. Go no…

Really the issue is swapability. The way the system is constructed, there's basically one monolith for customer-facing services and another for internal ops, and some smaller shared databases, services and a bunch of backup. This hews to the company's security profile, and the lack of scattered microservices (which I now consider fortunate) is also a result of that years-ago migration from dedicated servers where these two interconnected systems evolved along separate trajectories [edit: to the point where the customer facing system still only writes to its own mark/sweep DB that's picked up by the internal system, or in rare cases accesses internal APIs by cUrl ... so either could still be anywhere]. Going up a tier on one or both of those monoliths would be more difficult and costly if they're reserved. So in a sense, a long reservation would just be good insurance against the business not growing. But no one wants to pull the trigger on that.

Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending

#107

Post by arrmn »

burritosnob wrote: post #79
silisili wrote: post #40

I'd argue more than 81% of teams are way, way overspending on resume padding cloud stuff. My last company had all the AWS goodies, spending thousands per month...on a site that got around 50 hits a day.

I run a small consulting practice and we have pivoted almost exclusively to helping customers reduce cloud spend. Across 100+ engagements, with cloud spend raging from $500k-$40M per year, I can confidently state the following: >90% of companies are overspending on cloud resources. On average, 30-40% depending on provider (AWS is typically the worst). >75% of IT/Engineering teams have overbuilt their environments to…

This sounds really interesting, I'm not a prospect but want to learn more about it. Can I get in touch with you somehow?

Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending

#108

Post by jrumbut »

Closi wrote: post #89
jrumbut wrote: post #17

The headline would be more accurately stated (according to an image in the article) "81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending growth " The most common response (39%) was the C suite wanted spending to remain the same.

IMO I think that headline is less acccurate, because 'reduce growth' means 'grow, but less'.

You're right, I forgot to change the percentage.

The graphic doesn't even have a category for being directed to halt spend and less than half are being directed to reduce it in any way so I'm gonna say I still improved it ;)

Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending

#110

Post by silisili »

burritosnob wrote: post #79
silisili wrote: post #40

I'd argue more than 81% of teams are way, way overspending on resume padding cloud stuff. My last company had all the AWS goodies, spending thousands per month...on a site that got around 50 hits a day.

I run a small consulting practice and we have pivoted almost exclusively to helping customers reduce cloud spend. Across 100+ engagements, with cloud spend raging from $500k-$40M per year, I can confidently state the following: >90% of companies are overspending on cloud resources. On average, 30-40% depending on provider (AWS is typically the worst). >75% of IT/Engineering teams have overbuilt their environments to…

Man, working with you for just even one year would be extremely cathartic. Keep on keeping on...
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