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Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
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Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
#222[flagged]
Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not at liberty to say the company name, but i do directly know of one person at a director level who was fired for using AWS. They turned on encryption for an option and did not realize the huge price difference between the encrypted and unencrypted option meant $9000 per day in additional charges. After 1 month (30 days) this came to light, and he was fired.
that's not what people mean by the phrase "Nobody ever got fired for using AWS." http://wiki.c2.com/?NobodyEverGotFiredForBuyingMicrosoft
Before that it was 'IBM' ...
Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
#224Looks like $2B of savings are from reducing the number of servers (200,000 servers earlier to 70,000 now). That has nothing to do with the advantages of a private cloud over public, etc. They were just over-deployed and by reducing the number of servers they would have enjoyed similar savings no matter where they were running them. In fact they could have saved even more, and earlier, if they had already been in the…
Is $15,000 per server normal?
Once you get into the TB range with memory and disk, and 64+ cores, easily.
Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
#225Looks like $2B of savings are from reducing the number of servers (200,000 servers earlier to 70,000 now). That has nothing to do with the advantages of a private cloud over public, etc. They were just over-deployed and by reducing the number of servers they would have enjoyed similar savings no matter where they were running them. In fact they could have saved even more, and earlier, if they had already been in the…
Is $15,000 per server normal?
Yes.
"Server" implies redundant power supplies, 4-?? disks, an excess of high quality capacitors, a heavy steel case, a motherboard probably 4x the area of a typical ATX motherboard, ECC RAM, far more RAM slot capacity, etc.
Furthermore, extended service contacts are the norm. Five year same day on site service isn't unusual. Five year 24/7 on call/next day replacement is typical. One year warehouse service is unheard of.
That's just the device itself. Servers also imply a rack to put them in, real estate for said racks, 24/7 HVAC for said real estate set to substantially below room temperature, and an expectation to run it (and consume electricity) continuously. You also need network architecture to support them.
This isn't even getting into the realm of stupid specced servers. 512GB RAM? Easy. 128 cores? Sure. Disk space, network capacity are cost limited: if your server is limited by network speed or disk capacity you can simply punt a briefcase full of money at your supplier and get more. You want all of that arbitrary capacity disk space to be SSD that's just an accounting problem.
Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
#226Looks like $2B of savings are from reducing the number of servers (200,000 servers earlier to 70,000 now). That has nothing to do with the advantages of a private cloud over public, etc. They were just over-deployed and by reducing the number of servers they would have enjoyed similar savings no matter where they were running them. In fact they could have saved even more, and earlier, if they had already been in the…
Is $15,000 per server normal?
When you are a large enterprise ordering from the likes of HP, $15k is a budget server. I'd see bills for "Hadoop nodes" that were $650k/rack.
Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
#227I 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…
> For SMEs its the total opposite.
A cracking business opportunity: a cheap "personal cloud" for SMEs that just works? An extension would be an associated "public cloud", allowing customers to seamlessly move between their personal and the public cloud to cover short term scaling issues whilst they buy more private infrastructure.
Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
#228I work for banks, and I can tell you that when you are doing devops with their "own cloud", you are miles away from a real cloud experience : no os choice, no hardware choice, slow provisioning, no access to repo, low and inconstant virtual disk (EBS) speed... I guess that you get what your paied for, and maybe the 2B saved on cloud are spend on IT service that suffer from such a poor own cloud experience. If they ha…
> no os choice, no hardware choice, slow provisioning
These are probably positives from large org internal perspective.
"We want to switch x from y to z." "We can't. In fact we want to switch u from z to y."
> If they have 50 000 IT employees
BofA has 205k employees in 2019 as per Wikipedia. No way 1/4 of them are in IT.
Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
#229I 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…
Don't leave us hanging, whats #1?
Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This isn't simply about having fewer staff (although that can reduce internal politics and inefficiencies), but making fewer decisions and more importantly reducing the potential for making the wrong decisions This is a myth directly from cloud providers marketing campaigns: that using the cloud simplifies infrastructure to the point that you don't need as much and/or as qualified staff. In reality it is quite the…
I don't necessarily think you're wrong, but I think you're missing the point. Situation: some manager is tasked with updating some antiquated COBOL monstrosity. They're given twelve peanuts, some shoe string, bubble gum and a little bit of duct tape. The experienced staff have all been aged out, quit out of frustration or laid off and replaced with fresh college grads for half the price which was a great deal and sig…
> Risk for the company isn't the same as risk for a mid level decision maker. Small fuckups carry the same penalty as huge fuckups. (you get fired) From my fake story, doing it in house has a relatively high chance of being a minor fuckup, and AWS has a relatively low chance of being a major fuckup. The manager is going to choose the low probability risk, even though the low impact risk is the company's best interest.
Insightful. Can you clarify what you mean by "low probability risk" and "low impact risk" ?