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Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

businessinsider.com

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Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#181

Post by jankeymeulen »

cpeterso wrote: post #176
KaiserPro wrote: post #173

I used to work at a very large financial publishing company. I joined just at the point where they were moving from VMware to AWS. It was never a cost saving exercise. It was a way to completely change the culture of the IT department. As they were one of the very first news websites, they had at the time ~18 years of cruft to deal with. The drive to the cloud was about flexibility, and if we are honest, shaking the…

> mixture of SUN and Intel blades all backed by FC What is FC?

I'd guess fibre channel, to connect the blade servers to storage, like a SAN.

Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#182

Post by rosswilson »

cpeterso wrote: post #176
KaiserPro wrote: post #173

I used to work at a very large financial publishing company. I joined just at the point where they were moving from VMware to AWS. It was never a cost saving exercise. It was a way to completely change the culture of the IT department. As they were one of the very first news websites, they had at the time ~18 years of cruft to deal with. The drive to the cloud was about flexibility, and if we are honest, shaking the…

> mixture of SUN and Intel blades all backed by FC What is FC?

Fibre Channel, I think: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibre_Channel

Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#183

Post by jrockway »

cosmodisk wrote: post #168
jmartrican wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on the internal BOA cloud. My team wrote software to procure VM's via a website, versus the older (still current) way of doing it manually. There are two things worth considering. The BOA cloud is slow. That is to say, it is hard to procure machines to get your projects going. There is a lot of control on who will be paying for them. There is also A LOT of staff to manage it. So those 2 Billion could easily…

"I have seen (and maybe a lot of people here also) small companies with million dollar AWS bills." Ultimately,it doesn't matter, if the value it provides is greater than the AWS bill.

I am not sure I agree with that. Overpaying for something is still overpaying even if it provides value. Do you spend 100% of your salary on food? You will die if you don't eat. But somehow, the food required to keep you alive probably costs less than your salary.

Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#185

Post by milkytron »

sundbry wrote: post #151
julienfr112 wrote: post #126

I work for banks, and I can tell you that when you are doing devops with their "own cloud", you are miles away from a real cloud experience : no os choice, no hardware choice, slow provisioning, no access to repo, low and inconstant virtual disk (EBS) speed... I guess that you get what your paied for, and maybe the 2B saved on cloud are spend on IT service that suffer from such a poor own cloud experience. If they ha…

50,000 engineers just to run a bank? I don't think so.

JP Morgan has about 50k "engineers."

A lot of them are managers, analysts, or people who work with tech, but aren't all trained software engineers. A scrum master is considered an engineer. They had a blanket update to a lot of their role titles a couple years back where everyone in tech suddenly became a Software Engineer as their title (without much meaning behind it).

Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#186

Post by cortesoft »

cbsmith wrote: post #143

That implies their business would have data center costs beyond most tech companies (Lyft for example is spending $300 million with AWS over three years, Snap is spending $3 billion over five years). Something doesn't add up here.

Tech companies don't necessarily spend more on computing resources than non-tech companies. The article says they had 200,000 servers in 60 datacenters. That is certainly more than most tech companies, and is not surprising. A large bank probably has more computing needs than someone like Lyft.

Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#187

Post by tekno45 »

mherrmann wrote: post #172
kevstev wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are ~250k employees at JP Morgan, not engineers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPMorgan_Chase

s/employee/engineer/2 (Note the 2.)

What tool is this for? Sed?

I've copy pasted it before, but i think you just made the syntax click

Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#188

Post by cortesoft »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #184

Do banks using third-party cloud services just trust that the provider won't abuse their data? Do they actually store financial data there, or just use them for front-end stuff like websites?

Most of the cloud providers are PCI compliant: https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/pci-dss-level-1-faqs/

Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#189

Post by lmkg »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #184

Do banks using third-party cloud services just trust that the provider won't abuse their data? Do they actually store financial data there, or just use them for front-end stuff like websites?

The trust will come from very stringent contracts (beyond the regular contracts that other customers would use), third-party certifications that the provider achieves, and the provider being covered by certain aspects of the regulations that cover banks (or healthcare or whatever).

Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#190

Post by Spooky23 »

jedberg wrote: post #66
trabant00 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This isn't simply about having fewer staff (although that can reduce internal politics and inefficiencies), but making fewer decisions and more importantly reducing the potential for making the wrong decisions This is a myth directly from cloud providers marketing campaigns: that using the cloud simplifies infrastructure to the point that you don't need as much and/or as qualified staff. In reality it is quite the…

Yeah but you don’t need data center engineers, real estate specialists. Power specialists. Etc.

Sure you do, you’re just blending them into the rate, at a significant margin.

Cloud is awesome for companies where the capital investment needed to deliver the SLA is too expensive.

If you’re big, and you run the numbers, lots of services are better in a datacenter that you manage. Many of the early advantages of cloud tools aren’t a differentiator today. If anything, the granular billing is a nightmare to manage in many large enterprises. There’s a reason AWS heavily targets .gov customers — the Feds probably waste billions on idle services.

I’ve found that the shitty to support or known workload services are best somebody else’s problem. Email is an example of both. Most other things are trading IT complexity with accounting complexity.

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