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

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

#121

Post by BlargMcLarg »

buro9 wrote: post #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 facto…

This also means engineers need to be given the means to do so. From my experience, most engineers are not given the very basics to change things, observe important metrics and metric changes, and take the time to formulate a strategy.

In theory most places are running with slack. In practice they run under capacity, and engineers aren't going to worry about things out of their control.

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

#122

Post by diceduckmonk »

buro9 wrote: post #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 facto…

> That feels like it should be 100%.

It’s a matter of priority. During periods of revenue or user growth, reducing infrastructure cost may be a premature optimization. Now may be a time to focus on operational and logistical inefficiencies

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

#123

Post by raffraffraff »

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

There's a saying that I can't quite remember, so I'll just say it in my own words: reward people based on a metric, and that metric becomes their main concern. Worse still, they will learn to game the metric.

Building a new system that doesn't have a baseline cost? If the cost saving bonus is based on a reduction in existing cost then you don't get rewarded for a new implementation. The business don't have a baseline cost yet. So what do you do? Build it to run at a higher price, run it for a few months and then cut costs.

Also, is the reverse true? Deny bonus if costs rise. Because if it is, then the engineer has to prove that the increases are directly related to increased customer activity. But what if increases aren't relative to customer spend? Etc

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

#124

Post by vellum »

raffraffraff wrote: post #123
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

There's a saying that I can't quite remember, so I'll just say it in my own words: reward people based on a metric, and that metric becomes their main concern. Worse still, they will learn to game the metric. Building a new system that doesn't have a baseline cost? If the cost saving bonus is based on a reduction in existing cost then you don't get rewarded for a new implementation. The business don't have a baseline…

Goodhart's law - When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure

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

#125

Post by goodpoint »

solardev wrote: post #22
userbinator wrote: post #15

Marketing 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.

Their costs plus their profits is still cheaper than hiring your own people to rebuild what they've already done, except taking much longer and usually ending up with worse service. Unless you're an infrastructure or network logistics company, it's a waste of resources to build your own. Cloud services are so commoditized already it's unlikely to be any sort of meaningful differentiator for your company. Especially i…

> still cheaper than hiring your own people to rebuild what they've already done

That's plain false. Cloud companies are charging significant markups.

> except taking much longer and usually ending up with worse service ... it's a waste of resources to build your own ... Cloud services are so commoditized

All incorrect generalizations. Plenty of companies have capable engineers running their own services for cheaper. Do the math.

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

#126

Post by goodpoint »

xfitm3 wrote: post #66
faeriechangling wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this core competency stuff a lot and it’s just not so. I need organizations as small as teams of video editors run their own “datacenters” which may consist of as little as a Jellyfin server. A waste of resources? Is centralization into cloud datacenters or even CDNs all the way to the last mile a more efficient use of resources than plugging a 10gig connection into a NAS? Why haven’t all restaurants been dest…

I did an extensive cost analysis of a 1MW datacenter vs Cloud 10 years or so ago, so this stale data but take it as an anecdote. Accounting for the lease, facillity equipment (UPS, STS, CRACs, generator, fuel, raised flooring, cabinets, BMS, etc), compute equipment (PDUs, servers, spare parts), facilities and technical staff, the costs for AWS were substantially cheaper. The trick is you need skills, most of which ar…

> I amortized servers with an average server lifetime of 3 years

That's a mistake.

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

#128

Post by Dave3of5 »

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?

All pricing in AWS is usage based and you'll find it's your usage that is variable.

An example of this is s3 storage. You tend to find your storage cost will increase over time as you put more stuff into s3. S3 also charges per api call so you'd have to somehow fix that.

You have egress fess also which you're not in control of so variable customers usage will net a variable cost.

In terms of reserving compute power (a popular answer) you can also achieve fixed price with on demand if you don't auto scale. So reserving here doesn't remove that variability. Reserving just make it cheap if you have constant use. So you can reserve you DB server as it's always on and you'll save over on demand.

Many of the small cloud providers offer much less variability for their services with things like fixed networking cost. I tend to use those as I want a fairly fixed bill. The only thing that's variable on my cloud bill is backup storage and GBP to EUR exchange rate. The backup fee's are < 5% of the total cost at the moment.

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

#129

Post by darkwater »

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 have the same bad incentive when finance comes and say "cut 10% this year and 8% next year". You can porobably already cut over 20% today - after the needed work - but you will do the bare minimum because otherwise you will have less budget and possibility to cut even further next year.

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

#130

Post by raffraffraff »

sofixa wrote: post #92
oatmeal_croc wrote: post #47

"further 29% noting they’ve switched public cloud providers in the first half of 2022 due to high prices" Wait, what? There's no way 29% of companies noped their way out of cloud provider lock-in. Not saying it doesn't happen, but 29% is a huge number. Unless of course they're startups with no idea how they want their infrastructure run or legacy companies dipping their feet (?) in the cloud for the first time.

More and more companies (newer ones of course, those unburned by legacy) use public clouds as "managed Kubernetes and maybe a few other things like a database, load balancer, object storage". That way there is close to no lock-in, so the biggest challenge in switching clouds would be how to migrate the data and do the failover with minimal downtime.

It may be easier, but still take a lot of work to migrate. Perhaps k8s + object store + LB is easier for the developer, who has a few AWS APIs to replace, but is otherwise not affected. But talk to the person who has to rewrite 5k+ lines of terraform, figure out users, roles & policies in a new IAM, aunderstands the differences between EKS and GKE (what's the Google equivalent for IRSA?). None of it is rocket science, but it's time consuming. And while Google can migrate data from external databases (including AWS Aurora) it's still a big squeaky-bum moment.
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