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

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

#191

Post by phpisthebest »

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…

I have been in system administration for over 20 years... Cloud or OnPrem I have never once has a dev ask about the cost to deploy their new thing, software, etc

Never once has a dev asked about storage costs, of the differences in storing a file in a filesystem vs a blob in a database,

Never once ask about mem optimization could reduce infrastructure costs

never once

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

#192

Post by mm007emko »

carlmr wrote: post #101
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

>The solution never tried: share the spoils of efficiency with your teams. Funny enough, for all the problems with studying business administration, they do teach this as part of the principal-agent problem. If the principal wants something done, and the agent has no incentive to do it, you need to give the agent some of the incentive so their interests are aligned with yours. At the same time it's something you rare…

As a SW Engineer I have to say that this would not really work without some healthy dose of abuse.

Mangers at one of my previous workplaces were very vocal with "everything is running with slacks" so whenever I gave them an estimate on how long a feature would take to implement or a bug to be fixed (bugfix estimates are BS to begin with but...) they took it and multiplied it by 0.75 at most. Then bitched about it when it was over the time they assigned. Guess what happened.

Exactly this would happen with a cost-cutting incentive as well - if managers told us "reduce cost by 30% to the end of the year" then the cost would creep up to begin with. Incompetent management making stupid rules and stupid incentives is what drives me nuts :) .

The devil really is in the detail: "you need to give the agent some of the incentive so their interests are aligned with yours". The vast majority of employers don't pay SW Engineers enough and don't incentivise them enough so they give a shit. This really has to be a company culture, not forced but lived especially by managers, then it would work with engineers as well.

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

#193

Post by perrygeo »

An edict to reduce cloud spending can have perverse consequences in the hands of stakeholders that don't understand the technical requirements of the business. One of the primary reasons for using cloud resources is scalability - the ability to increase your workload when there is work to be done, without up-front capital costs. Having a cap on absolute cost while the business expects jaw-dropping growth in the work outputs defies the laws of physics.

These companies need to think in terms of improved cost efficiency and reduced waste _relative_ to the system throughput. If you incentivize your employees to reduce absolute cost absolutely, you'll lower throughput and build a culture where scaling up is a fearful event. Scaling up should be seen as a triumph - more work = more revenue - unless your business model is a total failure.

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

#194

Post by phpisthebest »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #86
jrumbut wrote: post #17

The headline would be more accurately stated (according to an image in the article) "81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending growth " The most common response (39%) was the C suite wanted spending to remain the same.

The problem is that if your business is dependent on the cloud, that's not actually your choice: The providers can, and will, change the prices whenever they want. As the crunch comes and even the FAANGs start layoffs, watch how fast buying an in-house VMware stack seems like an absolute bargain, including paying staff to build and maintain it.

There are 3 problems with that

1. Broadcom, if history is any indication, is about to make VMware much less of a bargain, likely exceeding the cost of the cloud, if not matching it.

2. Often time when a company moves to a cloud model, they lay off the traditional administration staff in favor of "DevOps", many many devops engineers would not have the first clue how to manage the low level infrastructure of Storage SAN, FiberChannel, vLAN's etc... let alone managing vSphere or hyperv, etc..

3. Often times when a company moves to a cloud model they decommission their Onprem Hardware, Lead times right now are crazy still so any org wanted to move to OnPrem quickly is going to be hard pressed to do so.

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

#195

Post by pclmulqdq »

xfitm3 wrote: post #66
faeriechangling wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this core competency stuff a lot and it’s just not so. I need organizations as small as teams of video editors run their own “datacenters” which may consist of as little as a Jellyfin server. A waste of resources? Is centralization into cloud datacenters or even CDNs all the way to the last mile a more efficient use of resources than plugging a 10gig connection into a NAS? Why haven’t all restaurants been dest…

I did an extensive cost analysis of a 1MW datacenter vs Cloud 10 years or so ago, so this stale data but take it as an anecdote. Accounting for the lease, facillity equipment (UPS, STS, CRACs, generator, fuel, raised flooring, cabinets, BMS, etc), compute equipment (PDUs, servers, spare parts), facilities and technical staff, the costs for AWS were substantially cheaper. The trick is you need skills, most of which ar…

3 years is a very short depreciation timeline for computers and associated equipment. That's how you ended up finding clouds being cheaper.

Many companies who buy their infrastructure learn that they can run servers for 10+ years if they are properly cooled and maintained. Parts that wear out (fans and disks) are cheaply replaceable.

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

#196

Post by throwawaaarrgh »

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…

In my experience, everyone should be buying RIs or a Savings Plan, right as soon as they start using instances. At the very least it's an incentive to plan to move to cheaper tech after 3 years. But it also takes at least 3 years for businesses to get serious about trying to save on their spend. And you can change instances or types during that time. Most people don't end up changing anything, though, and wish they had been saving.

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

#197

Post by ocdtrekkie »

phpisthebest wrote: post #194
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that if your business is dependent on the cloud, that's not actually your choice: The providers can, and will, change the prices whenever they want. As the crunch comes and even the FAANGs start layoffs, watch how fast buying an in-house VMware stack seems like an absolute bargain, including paying staff to build and maintain it.

There are 3 problems with that 1. Broadcom, if history is any indication, is about to make VMware much less of a bargain, likely exceeding the cost of the cloud, if not matching it. 2. Often time when a company moves to a cloud model, they lay off the traditional administration staff in favor of "DevOps", many many devops engineers would not have the first clue how to manage the low level infrastructure of Storage SA…

1. Definitely a concern, but Hyper-V is also free if you already license Windows.

2 and 3. Sounds like the decision to go to the cloud is going to hurt companies twice in the long run. Glad whatever CTO made that call got his bonuses and moved onto the next place already.

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

#198

Post by pclmulqdq »

adrianN wrote: post #18
userbinator wrote: post #15

Marketing can only go so far. Are more people finally starting to take their heads out of the cloud? Not only do cloud providers need to pay their own costs, they also need to make a profit on top of that; thus, if one thinks critically, the only time renting can be cheaper than owning is if it's short-term.

Renting can be cheaper than owning if the person you rent from can leverage economies of scale that you can't dream to achieve.

No. Forget the economies of scale, because they don't help you, as a buyer. What helps you is leverage.

The economies of scale only get passed to the consumer if another provider is willing to pass the savings on, which only happens in commodity markets (like oil, wheat, etc.). Low-end server rentals are a competitive market. "Big 3" cloud is not: they use differentiated products and egress fees to lock you in to their oligopoly.

They don't have to pass on their economies of scale to you. They don't pass on their economies of scale to you. They charge you slightly less than your cost to leave them, and that's it.

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

#199

Post by EFreethought »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #86
jrumbut wrote: post #17

The headline would be more accurately stated (according to an image in the article) "81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending growth " The most common response (39%) was the C suite wanted spending to remain the same.

The problem is that if your business is dependent on the cloud, that's not actually your choice: The providers can, and will, change the prices whenever they want. As the crunch comes and even the FAANGs start layoffs, watch how fast buying an in-house VMware stack seems like an absolute bargain, including paying staff to build and maintain it.

I know we have had cloud for about a decade, but for a while I wondered if we would eventually see a sort of bait-and-switch: Cloud providers raising prices long after most corporations have lost the in-house expertise to run a data center.

Granted, I have no idea how the costs compare. In every company I have been at, the higher-ups tell us in tech we have to "learn about the business side of things", yet the business side never wants to share information.

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

#200

Post by ElevenLathe »

i_have_an_idea wrote: post #161
zmmmmm wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always find it so weird that the first time in my whole career that I ever got authority to spend without literally any approval was when we got our cloud account. Every single other thing, even a $10 cab ride, had to be authorised. But when we signed up for AWS I just do whatever I do and finance pays the bill. I still do not understand how this happened.

Just imagine having to ask some guy in accounting to spin up a VM.

This was in fact the status quo before public clouds became popular. Machine time was billed out by the IT department back to projects and departments, so even getting an OpenVZ host would require forms and approvals, and could take weeks if vacations lined up poorly. I assume many companies are still like this. Certainly my current employer is: if you really actually want on-prem compute or storage you can get it, but it's a slog.

IMO this is the easiest way to drive cloud adoption: tell PMs that the cloud is instant but on-prem takes weeks.

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