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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

#161

Post by i_have_an_idea »

zmmmmm wrote: post #144
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.

Just imagine having to ask some guy in accounting to spin up a VM.

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

#162

Post by georgyo »

mcspiff wrote: post #51
georgyo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think growing food is the wrong analogy, and cooking is better. Growing food is more like designing and manufacturing servers. Cooking is more like taking these goods and putting them to use. There are plenty of places that host their own servers, including people that have these servers in their home or office. But far fewer produce these machines. You could also say that cooking food is dumb. What's wrong with ha…

The major cloud providers are designing their own servers, so we’re back at “growing your own food”.

McDonald's owns their own farms. They are big enough that controlling their supply chain is very important.

Facebook does not use cloud providers and designs their own servers.

The very large compute uses and cloud providers have incentives to grow their own food. Doing so can save them a few percent at scale. That savings is both not passed on to you and even if it was is not significant at small to medium scales.

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

#163

Post by KronisLV »

As someone who occasionally has to deal with on-prem projects, I sometimes wish I could just use self-service and acquire VPSes as needed to solve the need for resources, as I can in my personal projects.

Instead, I find myself being slowed down greatly: "Having a log shipping solution would be nice here, but I cannot set it up, because there's not enough RAM. Static code analysis? Not enough RAM. Another back end API instance for that new front end we're working as a replacement for the old one? Not enough RAM. Wanting to test how well scheduled processes run overnight with larger amounts of data? Too few CPU cores. Want more container images stored in your own Nexus instance? Not enough disk space. Want another database instance for CI or testing destructive migrations? Not enough of anything."

Which is the problem that the cloud largely solves, at the expense of way much money spent than necessary. But hey, when you have to deal with red tape to get more resources on-prem, that's just a way of managing the overall process and manages risks that you might not care about in the moment when you "just want to get things done"; albeit that's not to share that you shouldn't care about them.

So there are definitely problems with either approach (even cloud setups might have to go through someone and Jira/Redmine issues, as opposed to self-service), albeit at the end of the day most of those feel social/economical - after all, those large corps need their cloud service profit margins.

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

#164

Post by mvc »

paranoidrobot wrote: post #37
sgtnoodle wrote: post #10

I have access to a button that I can trivially press, that a coworker recently told me generates a $50 AWS bill.

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…

Haha, when I worked at a small IaaS, half my time on support rota was explaining how the SQL Server instance a customer launched was costing so much.

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

#165

Post by merpkz »

pid-1 wrote: post #93
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…

> 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…

Million dollar question - at which point it gets easier to learn how to host things on your own vs keeping up with this cloud mumbo-jumbo bull type of knowledge?

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

#167

Post by ethbr0 »

bayraktar wrote: post #145
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 e…

The silly support tickets that stay open forever and ever and ever is just a company being cheap.

If you don't fund, hire, and staff your support org with good people at multiple tiers, don't be surprised when you get crap. There just aren't enough good minds to service the incoming workload.

Oh, and for god's sake have a decent "to engineering" escalation path for the support folks.

Unfortunately, the support function is almost always a cost center and beholden to only, if anything, response time related SLAs. Instead of customer satisfaction, etc.

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

#168

Post by ldoughty »

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…

Each AWS account can have it's own support plan.. for a while we had some accounts with a mix of Enterprise and business support.. in fact, every child we made for business support for a while even though we had enterprise support across our AWS organizations

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

#169

Post by ethbr0 »

eb0la wrote: post #148
abofh wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Neat! Is this via third party services or Amazon itself? Curious about details on the retrade market.

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

#170

Post by wil421 »

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…

Reducing cloud costs should be a one year exercise. There should be a department level incentive, meaning if the whole department/org meets its goal they get the incentive. There should also be a team level incentive to encourage individual teams to find cost savings.

Commissions, metrics, and goals and heavily used by sales across many companies. I’m sure there is some abuse but it is still heavily used.

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