171–180 of 573 posts
Are they really going to close all their on-prem datacenters in the next 2 years? Maybe.
More likely, this is a way to build momentum around the transition to cloud. Not a bad strategy, and not uncommon from what I've seen in the enterprise.
Ultimately companies that abdicate their informatics operations like this will give their profits to their data-center operators, who will be empowered to charge them whatever price they want. Because what's their BATNA? Migrating from Azure to AWS when Microsoft doesn't want to let them? Renting your information infrastructure is a great way to reduce startup costs, but down the road, that information infrastructure…
Without a doubt, a future generation of executives will revisit and reverse the decision to rent all information infrastructure, but that will likely be many, many years down the road. In the meantime, the current generation of executives who made this decision will look very smart for saving the company lots of money for a good number of years. And they stand to benefit personally from it. They're doing the rational…
Most of them were renting most of the infra anyway:
- Co-location (physical space rented)
- Managed service to keep the lights on (power, back-up generators)
- Leased hardware that gets replaced every 3 years
- Managed service for switch, firewall, etc. monitoring
- ISP, back-up generators, etc.
> but that will likely be many, many years down the road
They're going to explain to their future bosses that buying land, building a huge building, buying servers, figuring out cooling, setting up redundant ISPs, etc. etc. is somehow going to be smarter? Explain that one to me?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That seems to be a common take on HN - cloud is too expensive. I'm curious whether the folks claiming that have any data center ops experience. Because, personally, I'd rather retire than deal with Dell, HP, Cisco, fibers, cooling issues, physical security, hardware failling... And that's just the hardware. Then you still need to pay VMWare for a decent virtualization platform, monitoring tools, etc.... Seriously, no…
To a company you need to pay those costs no matter what. If the AC breaks at 3am it neds to be fixed. It doesn't matter if you have your own HVAC people on sight 24x7, your own people on call to service it, a local HVAC service to come in, or you outsource the entire operations and so you have no idea how that is handled. In the end the important part of this story is that whatever you are doing with the AC continues…
Are they really going to save 400 m$, or was it the figure "promised" by the shop that will handle the migration?
There's not a company in the world that spends more than $1m annually on cloud costs that has saved money by doing so. You don't go to the cloud to save money, you go to the cloud to reduce technological risk. If you go to the cloud you don't need to fire anyone for choosing IBM, you're not getting strangled by any Oracle contracts, you're not gonna lose all your data because of security holes in your use of Microsof…
I don't know why I have to explain this every time "data center vs cloud" discussions come up, but if you reduce risks, then you are in effect saving money.
Ultimately companies that abdicate their informatics operations like this will give their profits to their data-center operators, who will be empowered to charge them whatever price they want. Because what's their BATNA? Migrating from Azure to AWS when Microsoft doesn't want to let them? Renting your information infrastructure is a great way to reduce startup costs, but down the road, that information infrastructure…
Once your start up has become an established company and are so busy that you are no longer able to scale down regularly, it seems that's the time to start having your own compute vs continuing to line the pockets of the cloud providers.
Ultimately companies that abdicate their informatics operations like this will give their profits to their data-center operators, who will be empowered to charge them whatever price they want. Because what's their BATNA? Migrating from Azure to AWS when Microsoft doesn't want to let them? Renting your information infrastructure is a great way to reduce startup costs, but down the road, that information infrastructure…
> that information infrastructure runs your company This is silly. There is a lot more to FedEx than hosting physical compute infrastructure. FedEx doesn’t own all its own airports. A CSP is just another vendor.
That's a competitive environment.
How many major cloud providers exist, and what could they do to make it difficult for FedEx to leaving for another one?
Ultimately companies that abdicate their informatics operations like this will give their profits to their data-center operators, who will be empowered to charge them whatever price they want. Because what's their BATNA? Migrating from Azure to AWS when Microsoft doesn't want to let them? Renting your information infrastructure is a great way to reduce startup costs, but down the road, that information infrastructure…
Does that truly sound achievable, when they have the most difficult to migrate part of their mainframe applications still on their mainframe? The easy stuff they have already moved off.
Also, from my understanding, it can take a tremendous number of distributed x86 systems to supplement the scale, speed and reliability of a mainframe. It's possible that unless FedEx gets away from managing storage arrays and hypervisor farms, they wouldn't have enough staff to operate the datacenters once they're full of enough servers to replace the mainframes.
Ultimately companies that abdicate their informatics operations like this will give their profits to their data-center operators, who will be empowered to charge them whatever price they want. Because what's their BATNA? Migrating from Azure to AWS when Microsoft doesn't want to let them? Renting your information infrastructure is a great way to reduce startup costs, but down the road, that information infrastructure…
Without a doubt, a future generation of executives will revisit and reverse the decision to rent all information infrastructure, but that will likely be many, many years down the road. In the meantime, the current generation of executives who made this decision will look very smart for saving the company lots of money for a good number of years. And they stand to benefit personally from it. They're doing the rational…
It's really just like the utilities these days, 98% people will not dig their own well and install some sewage system and buy a generator, but big companies can still opt to have them on-premise installed, even though some of those are just backup systems.
there is no return for the cloud for 98% of us.