191–200 of 573 posts
Its weird to have companies say they're moving from Mainframes to the Cloud. The Mainframe is a sort of cloud, each one has usually double the spare capacity and you call IBM to unlock it. The cost of running a Mainframe is measured in terms of MIPS based on amount of compute used and there's compute reserved for offloading things like JITs (zAAPS). Essentially a version of cloud compute costs. I can understand if yo…
How did Dropbox end up saving tens of millions bt making their own cloud infrastructure but FedEx loses money? Surely FedEx would have a metric shit ton of data?
Really, not the first example I’d reach for.
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I used to work with a very smart man that I'm sure was some kind of secret genius. He's was that sort of tech gofer. Hardware, software, didn't matter, if there was a problem he'd solve it. Sort of guy you'd see carrying a thick ass SQL book around because he 'needed to learn it' to solve just one little problem. He built whole entire solutions for the company I worked at in his spare time that the company once tried…
> "Change gives the illusion of progress". That itself is based on the belief that (historical) progress is an improvement. Mostly true over the last few centuries - aspirin is nice - except for those occasions where it was mass murder.
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> 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.
At almost every airport that FedEx has an operation at, there is another airport within 100 miles that could be used instead, managed by a different company. The barrier to changing is not controlled by the airports. 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?
Plenty! AWS is HUGE but hardly a monopoly.
>what could they do to make it difficult for FedEx to leaving for another one
If the guys running this at FedEx are smart, not much. There are ways to deploy all of this in a platform-agnostic way.
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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…
I think you are absolutely right, however when they do reverse the decision they will publish a great article about how bringing their datacentres in-house is going to save them $800m a year and a bunch of execs will grant themselves a bigger bonus for saving the company so much money. It's a win-win!
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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…
I used to work with a very smart man that I'm sure was some kind of secret genius. He's was that sort of tech gofer. Hardware, software, didn't matter, if there was a problem he'd solve it. Sort of guy you'd see carrying a thick ass SQL book around because he 'needed to learn it' to solve just one little problem. He built whole entire solutions for the company I worked at in his spare time that the company once tried…
That's a very succinct way to put it. I think that observation also applies to consumer technology (e.g. regularly re-doing UIs to "improve" them when the changes are either in fact regressions or just different but not better). We've had it drilled in our heads throughout the modern era that new == better (e.g. the ubiquitous "new and improved!" marketing language), but that's not actually always true. Change for change's sake justifies itself through that misunderstanding.
In the recent past, we had a really high rate of genuine technological progress. But at some point we'll have picked most of low hanging fruit and will enter a period of slower progress, where faking progress will become more an more tempting for producers than the real thing.
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…
Apple fairly notoriously hosts iCloud in other company’s clouds, and they’re a computer hardware and software company! If you’re less sophisticated than Apple, it’s a no-brainer to go with clouds.
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…
But by the time this becomes a problem the executive team will have cash out nice bonuses from the short term gains from cost savings...
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I agree, isn't it way easier to switch vendors when running on the cloud? I'd say that encourages competition, since we can literally move the infrastructure using keystrokes instead of muscles. This makes me think computer infra could potentially become a commodity.
As always, it depends on how you use it. Most cloud providers do let you run your own software on a managed substrate of infrastructure. But they also let you, nay, encourage you to build on top of their abstractions instead.