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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

#171

Post by gadflyinyoureye »

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.

My client does this. Really nice if you’re on the East coast. Ireland might have a few morning hours where nothing works in test. India has large chunks of time with the same issue. Surprisingly this hasn’t lead them to mock service locally. They are just less productive.

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

#172

Post by mathattack »

noduerme wrote: post #48
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…

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…

3 year reserved instances come with hidden costs:

- Engineers may want to switch sizes or go serverless.

- Long term vendor lock-in.

- Miss out on price cuts.

There’s a reason the vendors push them so hard. (No spot market on Azure either)

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

#173

Post by roody15 »

merpkz wrote: post #165
pid-1 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Old School IT guy here (19 years as Director of IT). I Host 80% of our main programs in house, Financial System, data-management, web servers, email servers, security door lock system, camera systems, etc. I have turned down offers of "cloud" for years we have a block of 32 IP addresses and this has been enough to handle our externally available resource needs.

It just always seems a bit salesie to me. Bring your network switching to the "cloud".. yadda yadda. Why? Everything is working great.

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

#174

Post by quickthrower2 »

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #121
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.

The good thing about spending $20k a month on cloud is they will happily take your money, and make it easy to do so, whereas spending the same on a dev means hiring them first which is a bit of a hassle.

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

#175

Post by quickthrower2 »

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

Ah a bonus for a narrow metric. Foolproof!

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

#176

Post by POPOSYS »

eb0la wrote: post #157
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.

Thanks for that info - very interesting!

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

#177

Post by goodpoint »

eb0la wrote: post #154
goodpoint wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

To calculate a meaningful yearly TCO you have to consider the real useful life of servers which is far longer than 3 years.

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

#179

Post by plantain »

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.

Azure support is just so bad it floors me.

Azure forced me onto invoice billing against my will - and every month without fail they don't automatically match my payment and I have to endure increasingly threatening emails that my account is pending termination while their support takes days to reply to my tickets about it, and when they do reply the advice is usually just 'wait a little longer'.

I've moved critical services off Azure because the risk of wrongful termination is just too high.

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

#180

Post by fanf2 »

eb0la wrote: post #154
goodpoint wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The lifetime of a server is at least 5 years, which is the typical warranty length for server kit.
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