FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes • Hacker News Board

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#211

Post by whatever1 » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 2:29 PM UTC

mrep wrote: post #187

whatever1 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost does not scale linearly with the #of packages. A table with 1 entry is not cheaper than a table with 1 million entries. The same routing algorithms have to run either they have one package or 1 million packages. Plus you need to keep the history of the operations for months if not years (meaning that you will store both holiday and random Tuesday data anyway). So where is this flexible cost exactly?

Ever heard of the traveling salesman problem because that is worse than linear, it is factorial. Granted, that is probably overkill for most people and my team (Not FedEx) just does NxN so it is only quadratic but it is definitely not constant nor even linear.

Exactly because tsp variants are exponentially combinatorial we solve them with a strict time limit and use the best found solution.

So for practical applications they are constant time.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#212

Post by renonce » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 2:29 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #19

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…

The network traffic price is absolutely vital. This is essentially the ransom that the cloud provider holds on you for leaving.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#213

Post by FpUser » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 2:30 PM UTC

pid-1 wrote: post #130

cs702 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That seems to be a common take on HN - cloud is too expensive. I'm curious whether the folks claiming that have any data center ops experience. Because, personally, I'd rather retire than deal with Dell, HP, Cisco, fibers, cooling issues, physical security, hardware failling... And that's just the hardware. Then you still need to pay VMWare for a decent virtualization platform, monitoring tools, etc.... Seriously, no…

>"I believe companies selling bare metal as a service are a happy compromise of cost and convenience, though."

This is what I do. I rent bare metal from Hetzner and OVH. I also have some hosting hardware right at my place. It saves me a ton of money and no I do not spend any meaningful time to administer. All done by a couple of shell scripts. I can re-create fresh service from the backup on a clean rented machine in no time.

As for cloud - if I need to run some simulation once a month on some bazillion core computer then sure. Cloud makes much sense in this particular case. I am sure there are other cases that can be cost effective. Bot for the average business I believe cloud is a waste of resources and money.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#214

Post by thdxr » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 2:32 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #19

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…

it was exactly this kind of thinking that lead to Japanese automakers crushing American ones

vendor relationships do not have to be hostile. AWS has been around for a while and has never raised prices, some services have gotten 99% cheaper.

yes there's some hypothetical day where they say "tricked you, all that stuff about margin being opportunity was a lie" and they try to extract value short term while burning their reputation

but every day that goes by where this doesn't happen is $$$ wasted on trying to avoid it

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#215

Post by humanistbot » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 2:33 PM UTC

langsoul-com wrote: post #84

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?

I'd bet Dropbox has way more raw bytes to store than FedEx. Plus, the Dropbox business model is based on data egress to clients, which is really expensive on cloud servers. FedEx needs data centers more for internal logistics, which is probably why they're going with Oracle.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#216

Post by RandomWorker » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 2:33 PM UTC

goindeep wrote: post #65

cs702 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

right now, they can't retain the people or afford the people to do this work. When you can go work elsewhere for more money you move. And, running a main frame isn't just having it, it's keeping the people running it, plus paying for the electricity and space.

Depending where, the real-estate and energy prices are nuts in most places. And, the engineers are expensive right now, and the services are cheaper.

It's not about giving it up, or change for the sake of change, it's about seeing the writing on the wall. These managers see the larger trends, rising energy costs, maintenance costs rising, hiring difficult, and retention of existing engineers impossible. Once you see those trends and a department is underwater and it's getting worse, you have to move. At another point in the market, when you may find engineers are less expensive, easier to hiring, technologies and space are less costly and easy to deploy. You move back.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#217

Post by sjtgraham » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 2:37 PM UTC

HPsquared wrote: post #209

goindeep wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It sounds a bit like the bodybuilding method of bulking and cutting.

Bodybuilders make progress though :)

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#218

Post by tbrownaw » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 2:38 PM UTC

sofixa wrote: post #111

hnarn wrote: post #23

Making accurate calculations of data center cost is of course complicated and rarely manages to take everything into account, but the common knowledge I’ve heard is that there comes a point when a company is so large that going on-prem is what actually saves them a lot of money. If FedEx is not large enough to be one of those companies, how large do you actually have to be? Or has cloud pricing changed to the point w…

It's not only about size, there's also workloads to take into consideration. Take FedEx, their operations are highly dynamic - per day but also per period. The number of packages sent, and being transported, vary greatly between a random Tuesday 15:00 and the weeks before holidays. In such a scenario, with your own infrastructure, you need to overprovision, by a lot, to be able to handle the heaviest load possible, a…

Someone, somewhere, has to actually buy the computers. "Only pay for what you use" isn't magic, whatever fraction actually gets used (across all customers) has to end up paying for the whole computer.

Taxis are "only pay for what you use", but owning your own car is often cheaper (even if you only use it, what, 1/12 of the day?) and more convenient.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#219

Post by nonfamous » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 2:38 PM UTC

int0x2e wrote: post #105

tpetry wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example FedEx flies Boeing jets. It's completely reliant on Boeing for parts for those jets. Presumably Boeing can charge whatever it wants. Nobody said that FedEx should build their own server hardware. And that's what you are comparing it too. FedEx could just buy server appliances from e.g. Dell (buying the Boeing jet) and operating it. Because paying some other air cargo company will eat a lot of their marg…

I'm simplifying here, but it feels to me like you are making the assumption that FedEx is a mostly static business, whose IT needs should be all about minimizing the cost per IO or compute operation. In the real world, business needs are rarely static, and moving fast and innovating is extremely valuable, even for a company as large as FedEx. They are choosing to move resources from managing their IT infra to AWS, bu…

Probably not AWS, given that Amazon is a major competitor to FedEx in the logistics sector.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#220

Post by bosveld » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 2:38 PM UTC

Another way of looking at at: Where own data-center cost gets to high it might be due to lack of responsibility to act or inability to manage.

A company then have two options: (a) replace/pressure top/middle management to get costs down and processes streamlined or, (b) move to the cloud. Its easier (and possibly good for your resume) to move to the cloud and then a few yours later -- decide again.

So moving to the cloud is sometimes an indicator of an inflexible/stale/mature company.