191–200 of 321 posts
> The bank, which has a $10 billion annual tech budget Am I the only one completely befuddled by this number? What the fuck are they doing with these money and 200k servers? These are facebook numbers. For a bank. What?
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…
What was the opex before cloud?
That said.
The method of encoding production database credentials was rot-13. No joke. In the Quartz interface, you could double click on a starred-out set of credentials, and it would run rot-13 on it and display the password. This was for FX, rates, credit card, mortgage, etc etc etc. Having access to this cloud system gave effective access into all of Bank of America and Merrill Lynch.
They probably save a lot of their money by using very, very bad practices.
Still only the second worst security fail I've seen.
I'm not really sure why this should be a surprise. Just as big companies use a mixture of owned and rented real estate for various reasons, the same is true of other large expenses. If you have a large, predictable, core workload it makes sense to bring it in house, and use the elastic (rented) resources for unpredictable stuff (e.g. new efforts). It's not like Amazon doesn't know this too (e.g. they try to make the…
Were the opposite true, you'd wonder about the economics of the cloud business model.
I think a more interesting way to look at this is, are the other advantages of cloud services (e.g. lots more flexibility and bundled proprietary technologies that you can't economically build yourself) actually worth the extra money?
Yes, by not using a cloud service you might save $2B a year, but does that cost you the opportunity to make even more than that, given you're probably moving slower or at least less efficiently than you otherwise could?
I used to work at Bank of America as a level 2 app analyst back when they first started building Quartz. At the time, it was advertised internally as a system to be used for reporting, and so it had lots of built-in functionality to connect to databases, etc. Pretty neat. That said. The method of encoding production database credentials was rot-13 . No joke. In the Quartz interface, you could double click on a starre…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe it’s because wages are a lot lower in Europe? Better to outsource to the cloud than hire more people if people are expensive.
IDK where you get the 'wages are a lot lower in Europe' thing. There are lower cost and higher cost places, but people are expensive and talent is mobile.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon can invest heavily in new tech because it has millions of customers who get the benefit. BofA can only invest in new tech to the degree that it benefits one (admittedly large) customer. This makes the decision seem more suspect in the long-run.
Counterpoint: BoFA can invest in tech that makes sense for its specialized use case that Amazon never would.
A billion dollars sounds like a ton of money on HN, but that's a thousand person tech team for 3 or 4 years. It's enough to do some good tech, but it's very, very easy to spend that much engineering capacity.
I used to work at Bank of America as a level 2 app analyst back when they first started building Quartz. At the time, it was advertised internally as a system to be used for reporting, and so it had lots of built-in functionality to connect to databases, etc. Pretty neat. That said. The method of encoding production database credentials was rot-13 . No joke. In the Quartz interface, you could double click on a starre…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Counterpoint: BoFA can invest in tech that makes sense for its specialized use case that Amazon never would.
To the degree that BofA has needs that are unique just to itself, and do not overlap other large business's use cases, this is true. But that seems like an awfully small degree. A billion dollars sounds like a ton of money on HN, but that's a thousand person tech team for 3 or 4 years. It's enough to do some good tech, but it's very, very easy to spend that much engineering capacity.