Just drop AWS for most use cases and you’ll be fine.
81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending
111–120 of 235 posts
Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending
#112The 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…
Incentives are one of those things everyone knows we need, but nobody can design safely. A bit like security, we often come across systems that can be gamed due to unforeseen issues with the design.
Google "Hanoi rats" for an incentive blowup. Then there's myriad other incentive issues related to taxes and subsidies, all stuff that had the good intention of promoting good things and reducing bad things.
Sometimes its a meta-game: if a team sees a "share the spoils" scheme being trialled with another team, maybe they shouldn't fix their issues until there's a scheme in place for their team? What about the shape of the payoff? If you fix two issues in the same period, are you better off or worse off than splitting them over a boundary?
Even in sports, there's issues: there's an incentive payment to break the world record. Say you can pole vault 10cm higher than the previous record in your practices. But why break it once when you can break it 10 times? I read about this some time ago, should be findable online.
Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending
#113How many would say this normally? I.e., what's the baseline? Meanwhile, how many are giving their teams the resources (i.e., people) necessary to do the analytics on the bill required to find & cut costs? Every cloud I've worked with has been terrible at billing in a way that could be reasonable investigated. At one point we literally pulled all the billing data into a SQLite database. (And that was a great idea, as…
> where the money is going AWS in particular is handsomely engineered so you can't answer this sort of question, as well as making people spend more without need. - Per resource cost is turned off by default. Turning it on costs money. How much? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ - Services like S3 will bill you per API call. How do you know who is calling your APIs? Using Cloud trail, which is turned off by default. Turning it on for this s…
>- Using many accounts is by far the best way to segregate unrelated projects. But then, you will end up paying for many criminally underutilized NAT GWs, VPN connections, Load Balancers, etc...
Not if you use shared VPCs.
Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending
#114The 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…
Rather they than just "they don't like to share", the BA types don't do this because in one of their other classes they have been taught about the downsides of such incentives, like:
- Corrosive effects on team cohesion, when separate ICs compete to see who can find cost savings first.
- The "cobra effect", where engineers will deliberately introduce cost inefficiencies so that they can fix their own bugs later.
- (Related to the previous point) Prevention of cost overruns is even cheaper than fixing leaks after the fact, but is very hard to properly incentivize.
Any class on principal-agent problems will hopefully include a chapter warning against asymmetric incentives and how they will be ruthlessly exploited by the agents. Engineers are not some exception here, in fact because of their training they are often extra good at spotting loopholes in the rules.
Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending
#115How many would say this normally? I.e., what's the baseline? Meanwhile, how many are giving their teams the resources (i.e., people) necessary to do the analytics on the bill required to find & cut costs? Every cloud I've worked with has been terrible at billing in a way that could be reasonable investigated. At one point we literally pulled all the billing data into a SQLite database. (And that was a great idea, as…
> where the money is going AWS in particular is handsomely engineered so you can't answer this sort of question, as well as making people spend more without need. - Per resource cost is turned off by default. Turning it on costs money. How much? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ - Services like S3 will bill you per API call. How do you know who is calling your APIs? Using Cloud trail, which is turned off by default. Turning it on for this s…
> - Using many accounts is by far the best way to segregate unrelated projects. But then, you will end up paying for many criminally underutilized NAT GWs, VPN connections, Load Balancers, etc...
And you can have business support only on one account... obviously you can go Enterprise and have the same support level on everything but pay a lot more $$$
Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending
#116Marketing can only go so far. Are more people finally starting to take their heads out of the cloud? Not only do cloud providers need to pay their own costs, they also need to make a profit on top of that; thus, if one thinks critically, the only time renting can be cheaper than owning is if it's short-term.
> thus, if one thinks critically, the only time renting can be cheaper than owning is if it's short-term.
There's no real alternative to cloud-based hosting if your application needs to be reachable from more than one geographical region or has wildly volatile usage patterns.
Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending
#117This is why I'm sticking with pure vps/dedi providers - they'll give you fixed monthly costs per instance, plus network transfer, which is usually free below some threshold (unlike the Big Three). If you know what you are doing, you can negotiate fixed price two/three years in advance and get a discount.
There is an initial setup cost, but maintenance is usually cheap if you put things in place correctly, automate everything and put proper monitoring system (not the cloud version, of course).
Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending
#118> "Directed to reduce" Cloud spending.
That feels like it should be 100%.
An engineer should be as aware of their $ costs as they are their CPU load, filesystem I/O, or memory usage. An engineer should know how many instances they scaled to, and when they're going to scale down.
In fact, the $ cost should be calculable (to a reasonable indicative amount by napkin math - precision not necessary) according to the factors the engineer knows.
Not being aware of the costs feels irresponsible on the part of the engineer. There was a time when we had finite capacity (a single server) and perhaps the engineer had to care less about the cost then (but perhaps they should've cared about utilisation by some measure even then)... but now we're in an age of your application being able to scale beyond reasonable bounds of your companies purse strings, a solid understanding of what your application costs is an essential and core skill. If this is not the game you wanted to play, stay on a VPS or VM.
Anyone possessing a solid understanding will also be looking to reduce or halt their spending... hence, I am surprised the number in the headline is not higher, even ignoring the macro-economic picture.
Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending
#119The 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
At Yahoo in 2015 we had the CFO challenge: find cost savings and get a bonus up to $50k. I think it was $1k per $100k in annual savings. One guy turned off staging at night and saved $600k/yr.
Doesn't Yahoo have engineers in non-US timezones?
Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
> where the money is going AWS in particular is handsomely engineered so you can't answer this sort of question, as well as making people spend more without need. - Per resource cost is turned off by default. Turning it on costs money. How much? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ - Services like S3 will bill you per API call. How do you know who is calling your APIs? Using Cloud trail, which is turned off by default. Turning it on for this s…
> - Using many accounts is by far the best way to segregate unrelated projects. But then, you will end up paying for many criminally underutilized NAT GWs, VPN connections, Load Balancers, etc... And you can have business support only on one account... obviously you can go Enterprise and have the same support level on everything but pay a lot more $$$
Is this the same for child accounts created via AWS Orgs?