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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

#151

Post by eb0la »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #86
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.

The problem is that if your business is dependent on the cloud, that's not actually your choice: The providers can, and will, change the prices whenever they want. As the crunch comes and even the FAANGs start layoffs, watch how fast buying an in-house VMware stack seems like an absolute bargain, including paying staff to build and maintain it.

If you have containerized loads, you're gonna need something more than just vanilla VMWare. Right now your choices are Tanzu ($$$), Rancher, RedHat Openshift on prem ($$$) or Ubuntu...

Probably your savings will come from beign able to get bigger machines. After 4 years in the cloud I am still surprised to see how performant physical servers are.

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

#152

Post by eb0la »

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.

A lot of companies run vanila VMs 24/7. Switching providers is quite easy - just add some networking and a migration tool. The key here is just the DNS or the AD.

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

#153

Post by phillu »

darkwater wrote: post #132
raffraffraff wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this the same for child accounts created via AWS Orgs?

I guess so, unless we were severely misinformed. We had historically one big AWS account, we are now splitting it into more fine-controlled accounts and migrated under a "root" account following AWS best-practices to have unified billing and we can enable the Business support only on the big (legacy) account where we run 100% prod and other things. I don't think we had the option to enable it on the root account and…

This is not the case for us. Support is automatically enabled for all the accounts we create in our Organization. Not sure if this depends on company size though

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

#154

Post by eb0la »

goodpoint wrote: post #126
xfitm3 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why? after amortization they have 0 value in you books, which means your assets don't sink your balance sheet.

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

#155

Post by eb0la »

biggc wrote: post #73
paranoidrobot wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's various levels of foot-gun clicks that can generate AWS bills many orders of magnitude larger. Reserved Instances are a really quick and easy way to blow a few million with one click. Europe (Frankfurt), 3 year, all-upfront, Windows w/ SQL Enterprise, Dedicated Tenancy, u-12tb1.112xlarge instance at $5,926,378 up-front. The discounted $225/hour rate for it disappears into the background noise. (No, I'm not wi…

Wow! I was trying to find those numbers and the highest I could get to was ~899k. Then I switched to the OS to Windows from Linux. That licensing fee is wild!

OS Licensing is crazy. Last month I was telling a customer that they should just change their Qlikview system to something else just to avoid paying 25% of their bill to Microsoft.

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

#156

Post by adrianN »

faeriechangling wrote: post #61
solardev wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

You'd be surprised how many restaurants base large parts of their menu on reselling pre-prepped food that they just throw in a deepfryer.

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

#157

Post by eb0la »

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?

In Spain Google offers a fixed-price for the goverment. It is very hard for the goverment to by stuff from the cloud since they must have a fixed budget for it, no surprised attached.

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

#158

Post by vidarh »

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…

As an anecdote on the knowing where money is going front:

One of the most effective ways I've found to drive change in how product management and execs treat engineering was getting average salary numbers by type of position for my team out of HR, and attributing costs toward every major feature request + meetings in a weekly report.

My manager at the time, the CEO of a VC funded startup, did not see the point. We were after all already paying for the engineers, and they were always fully loaded. Until he'd seen a couple of reports, and saw what it told us about prioritisation.

Our project and product managers got a lot less meeting-happy after seeing one regular meeting they were very fond of cost an estimated 10k/month due to the number of people attending, and they got a lot more thoughtful about feature request and how to prioritize after seeing the real costs of supposedly "trivial" requests that had previously been slipped past normal processes.

Same applies on the cloud front, yet a lot of what has driven the adoption of cloud is that it often helps engineering escape cost analysis and efforts to optimize costs.

And so you get organisations which often have no idea which decisions contribute what to those costs.

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

#159

Post by buro9 »

diceduckmonk wrote: post #122
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

Whilst I high level agree, I also high level disagree.

Even during hyper growth you should be aware of your costs, because you should have an idea of your margin.

I'm not sure any engineer that has awareness of costs, CPU, memory, storage, network, etc... is not trying to reduce some of it - even during hyper growth.

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

#160

Post by gbersac »

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

Why to charity? Give it to them directly. That being said, you'll create bad incentives: for a team to create badly optimized infra cost then to reduce it and cash in the difference.
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