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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

#141

Post by nigma1337 »

bradleyjg wrote: post #70
deathanatos wrote: post #23

How 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…

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.

I've only had one experience with azure support, Back when i was first getting into cloud/playing around with servers, I had forgotten to shut down the VPC i rented there, and I ended up with a bill of ~100$, which is a decent chunk for a student.

Wrote to support, explained my situation, and they removed the bill without any hassle.

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

#142

Post by tarranoth »

jshen wrote: post #7
intrasight wrote: post #4

I'd think 100% of businesses would direct to reduce spend

It’s opportunity cost. Is it better for developer X to increase revenue by adding a feature or save money reducing a cost? It depends.

It sort of reminds me of a video I watched some time ago where some guy explains how he was cutting costs, by instead of having a high memory server they used one with nvme SSD and cut on memory usage a bit (I believe they used it to host some redis instance). Was like 1700 dollar difference per month, although I couldn't help but think if the time spent on the project was actually worth the manhours paid to the guy for cutting those costs.

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

#143

Post by styren »

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.

There are plenty of cloud providers that offer cheap and feature-rich services if you look away from the hyperscalers, disclaimer: I'm part of a team building one. However most users aren't swayed by only price so it's a tough market to break into.

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

#144

Post by zmmmmm »

solatic wrote: post #52

Cloud computing made financial control the new engineering. Unless your service is running at an astronomical scale, nobody cares that your refactor saved 50 MB of RAM. The cloud vendors don't care if your workload needs 128 MB RAM, 256 MB RAM, 8 GB RAM. They'll run anything. Just pay for it. The industry is in a weird spot right now where Finance doesn't understand Engineering well enough to provide proper direction…

I always find it so weird that the first time in my whole career that I ever got authority to spend without literally any approval was when we got our cloud account. Every single other thing, even a $10 cab ride, had to be authorised. But when we signed up for AWS I just do whatever I do and finance pays the bill. I still do not understand how this happened.

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

#145

Post by bayraktar »

deathanatos wrote: post #23

How 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…

But how does it take a over week to answer the question?

Sounds like the more basic problem is that we keep ending up working in companies where the "higher ups" are constantly shoving decisions down our throats.

Which, ultimately, is probably the root cause of most of the caginess, the yak shaving, the compunction to use cloud databases and cloud-everything, and the silly support tickets that stay open forever and ever and ever.

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

#146

Post by victorNicollet »

deathanatos wrote: post #23

How 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…

Hey, we've had our blob storage costs spike up +70% for two days (Oct 4th and Oct 5th), across almost all of our storage accounts, regions and hot/cold/archive tiers. The spike is a consistent ~70% for each of the affected accounts, and this includes accounts where there have been no writes for months (so why is there an increase), as well as accounts where we never delete (so while an increase would be surprising, the decrease on Oct 6th is impossible). Is this similar to what you're seeing ?

I was considering writing to Azure support about that...

My last billing issue with them took ~120 days to resolve, so I don't have much hope.

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

#147

Post by marcinzm »

aetherane wrote: post #119
phamilton wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Or testing an emergency fix if something breaks at 4am. Problem with these types of metric driven approaches is that it incentives explicitly not caring about second order effects or externalities. Good for the person getting the bonus but bad for the company as a whole.

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

#148

Post by eb0la »

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…

IMHO Reservations in AWS are good if you have a US Bank Account. Why? Because there is a secondary market (run by AWS) where you can buy and sell reservations.

If you have a 1-year project that will have a 1-year extension, then get a 3-year reservation (with some amount upfront) that you can sell.

Your second best option is a Savings Plan.

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

#149

Post by marcinzm »

WJW wrote: post #114
carlmr wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. - (R…

There's also always second order effects or externalities which this incentivizes engineers to hide or play ignorant about. To ensure group cohesion other engineers also have an implicit incentive to not bring them to light. So they get their bonus and in three months the cost savings is undone as those come to light.

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

#150

Post by Aeolun »

jamesfinlayson wrote: post #65
Aeolun wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Surprisingly enough we have 3 people working on it right now. Sadly they’ve found that it was extremely easy to save several thousands of dollars a day, and has been so for the past two years.

Not sure how you did it but I've worked for a company that enabled you to tag resources with operating hours and stuff got shut down outside of the those operating hours - pretty handy way to cut down on usage because most non-live environments don't need everything running 24x7.

This was mostly properly scaling down things that didn’t need to be up all the time (as far as I understand it, I wasn’t part of the effort). We do already have a system that shuts down services when they’re not needed (based on tags, so presumably sort of the same thing).
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