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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

#201

Post by phpisthebest »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #197
phpisthebest wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Microsoft has stated many times they are "Cloud First" and hyperv development seems to be focused on Azure HyperV with limited features and improvements coming to OnPrem Hyperv, Hyperv for OnPrem still has ALOT of features missing even when comparied to linux based hypervisors let alone VMWare.

It is also unclear what the long term path is for OnPrem Windows Server, many people believe in the next 5 years it will be replaced with some Variant of "Azure Stack" and will be billed on a subscription basis

from hardware vendors, to Microsoft. The future is clear. Everything as a Service is coming for OnPrem, your network, storage, and hosts will all be some subscription model just like "cloud"

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

#202

Post by phpisthebest »

squokko wrote: post #135
strawhatguy wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But do they have to care? The right answer is to set an actual budget. Finance to engineering: you have $x to work with. Then engineering cares, and the needed talks/concern about resource usage can happen. Part of engineering is optimization, cost is one metric to optimize.

You need to understand the engineering to set a sensible budget. What should the concrete budget be for a new 50-story skyscraper in New York City? You'd need to know quite a bit about the specific building and the construction market to answer that question. You couldn't just be some MBA with a spreadsheet.

But you are working backwards from how most people and businesses do budgeting

Budgets are not about what things cost, it is about what you or the business can afford.

For example, I do not need to know how much Steak is this week to know I have $100 for food.. If steak fits in the budget then great, if not I get chicken... or beans...

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

#203

Post by toomuchtodo »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #184
roody15 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 net…

I always get the feeling that most cloud ideas come straight out of California, where hiring even an unexperienced administrator could cost you a couple hundred grand a year. Of course cloud services look pretty attractive if you can just instead hire one consultant for a one time fee and pay way less until your business grows. The problem is that mostly anywhere else in the world, you can get personell for much chea…

If you're a startup with VC money, cloud is for you. The game is scaling as fast as possible, costs be damned. But then came the cargo cult, where if you wanted to be hip, smart, and innovative, why you no cloud? This has led to a lot of orgs jumping in and finding out, "holy shit this is expensive AF and we're not getting a lot of value out of this spend." I have seen this a lot in financial services for example, but there are savvy orgs: Bank of America saves $2B/year by running their own internal cloud infra.

For highly volatile workloads, ephemeral workloads, anything where go forward capacity is fuzzy or unknown, cloud is awesome. For anything where your margins aren't robust, or your workload is known and consistent, you're better off going through the schlep of internal IT management (as long as your org isn't dysfunctional and how you operate this is a business enabler, not a hinderance, forcing shadow IT attempts). If you can't generate more revenue or margin, you've gotta look at cost savings, including the cloud premium.

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

#204

Post by tinco »

oatmeal_croc wrote: post #47

"further 29% noting they’ve switched public cloud providers in the first half of 2022 due to high prices" Wait, what? There's no way 29% of companies noped their way out of cloud provider lock-in. Not saying it doesn't happen, but 29% is a huge number. Unless of course they're startups with no idea how they want their infrastructure run or legacy companies dipping their feet (?) in the cloud for the first time.

Our only lock-in was using the GCS api instead of S3. I spent a week porting it to S3 and now there's nothing binding us to GCP. There's a whole bunch of S3 compatible storage solutions, we went with Backblaze's B2 as a secondary, if it proves stable and performant we'll switch over and find another cheap provider for our backup.

We're a rather simple company though, less than a dozen services, we use Postgres and Redis for storage, everything deployed on Kubernetes.

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

#205

Post by phamilton »

aetherane wrote: post #119
phamilton wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At Yahoo in 2015 we had the CFO challenge: find cost savings and get a bonus up to $50k. I think it was $1k per $100k in annual savings. One guy turned off staging at night and saved $600k/yr.

Doesn't Yahoo have engineers in non-US timezones?

This was the staging for our specific team and we were all US based and on the west coast.

I can guarantee you that they spent more than $50k/month on all staging environments.

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

#207

Post by phamilton »

marcinzm wrote: post #147
aetherane wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't Yahoo have engineers in non-US timezones?

Or testing an emergency fix if something breaks at 4am. Problem with these types of metric driven approaches is that it incentives explicitly not caring about second order effects or externalities. Good for the person getting the bonus but bad for the company as a whole.

We had a particularly big staging environment for the small team we were. In fact we had 11 of them. This engineer, years earlier, had rolled out "bento box" environments where we could launch a full as many identical staging environments as we needed.

I believe we did keep an official staging running, but the 11 bento environments were the ones that shut down at night.

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

#208

Post by TheCoelacanth »

buro9 wrote: post #159
diceduckmonk wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That feels like it should be 100%. It’s a matter of priority. During periods of revenue or user growth, reducing infrastructure cost may be a premature optimization. Now may be a time to focus on operational and logistical inefficiencies

Whilst I high level agree, I also high level disagree. Even during hyper growth you should be aware of your costs, because you should have an idea of your margin. I'm not sure any engineer that has awareness of costs, CPU, memory, storage, network, etc... is not trying to reduce some of it - even during hyper growth.

The question was whether the C-suite is telling them to reduce costs, not whether they are doing anything to reduce costs.

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

#209

Post by ocdtrekkie »

EFreethought wrote: post #199
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.

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 busine…

Well, absolutely, but it's even worse than that: Cloud actually doesn't make sense for large, established companies. The benefits of quickly scaling up and down can make it worthwhile for a startup, but a company with a well-established business that has a predictable workload has no reason to pay extra for this.

All of the large enterprises who have transitioned to cloud have really good sweetheart deals, often with additional ties to other business initiatives between the cloud provider and other enterprise. They know the savings they're getting is extremely short-term, and presumably they expect to re-acquire or retain the talent to leave eventually.

Bear in mind, if you want an idea how little established enterprise values the cloud, in the year of our Lord 2022, the first automaker to transition to AWS is happening, announced last week: https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/13/23401350/bmw-amazon-web-... The way you can translate this is that if it took over a decade for the first automaker to transition to the leading cloud provider, few to no other auto manufacturers are outsourcing their data to the cloud. And I'm willing to bet BMW got a really epic deal to convince them to do it.

The reason things like multi-cloud are so derided is that these companies' goals are to get you entirely dependent on their proprietary service design, so that it's too hard to ever leave. You can't go on-prem, you'd need to do a whole bunch of engineering to transition to a competitor's platform, etc. So you just suck it up and keep handing them a blank check every month.

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

#210

Post by marcosdumay »

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.e., what's the baseline?

I don't believe a baseline exists. The cloud is a new thing, and the fashion on how to use it is still changing constantly.

You also can not use this number as a proxy for any other thing. It's just what it is, you can't look for deeper connections.

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