Earlier quoted context omitted.
4y is insane for anything before round B (?). Might as well bootstrap at this point.
Yea, but when I say "Medium-Sized" I definitely don't mean "before round (B)".
doh i missed the medium sized part %)
81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending
221–230 of 235 posts
Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
Rather they than just "they don't like to share", the BA types don't do this because in one of their other classes they have been taught about the downsides of such incentives, like: - Corrosive effects on team cohesion, when separate ICs compete to see who can find cost savings first. - The "cobra effect", where engineers will deliberately introduce cost inefficiencies so that they can fix their own bugs later. - (R…
Does the cobra effect happen because people are greedy and cynical, or does it happen because the people already have contempt for those offering the incentive?
Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending
#223As a sample size of 1, I can say we've not been directed to reduce or halt cloud spending, but maybe we're just good at optimizing and always considering cost before creating new apps/services.
Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending
#224Incomming, the submarine articles telling you that bare metal is back and that it was cool to setup your monolith with vertical scaling all along.
As much as I love shitting on AWS, at this point I would just retire if I ever need to interact with a server vendor again.
We need new server vendors.
Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure how you did it but I've worked for a company that enabled you to tag resources with operating hours and stuff got shut down outside of the those operating hours - pretty handy way to cut down on usage because most non-live environments don't need everything running 24x7.
My client does this. Really nice if you’re on the East coast. Ireland might have a few morning hours where nothing works in test. India has large chunks of time with the same issue. Surprisingly this hasn’t lead them to mock service locally. They are just less productive.
Why not expand the range? The running of the service can’t be more expensive than the devs right?
Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, bu…
> For highly volatile workloads, ephemeral workloads, anything where go forward capacity is fuzzy or unknown
The thing is, I've yet to see any startup even with VC money that has a product which has this need. Most startups nowadays factor away common crud, like booking a service or providing organisational tools. These high pressure, intense workloads are often incredibly unrealistic.
Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rather they than just "they don't like to share", the BA types don't do this because in one of their other classes they have been taught about the downsides of such incentives, like: - Corrosive effects on team cohesion, when separate ICs compete to see who can find cost savings first. - The "cobra effect", where engineers will deliberately introduce cost inefficiencies so that they can fix their own bugs later. - (R…
Does the cobra effect happen because people are greedy and cynical, or does it happen because the people already have contempt for those offering the incentive?
Why not both? Or even better, why not a more noble third reason, like "people like their children to eat well and see this as an opportunity to make it happen"? Humans are complex and can have more than one motivation for any given action.
Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending
#228> multicloud usage is becoming increasingly unwieldy Is anyone having a good multicloud experience? Any advice to share about keeping workloads portable across clouds?
How to multi-cloud.
* Start with your architecture, KISS is king. Monolith using as few pieces as you reasonably can. Do you really need two DBs? Do you really need a message queue? etc. Trim, cut, remove. Scaling is mostly accomplished by using larger/faster systems.
* Only use the basic services universally available (VM, S3). You need your own provisioning and backup scripts and routines.
* Use your own VPN, nebula has been good for me. Makes your multi cloud infrastructure look like a flat network internally.
* Be very aware of egress costs and how your provider calculates them. Keep intra-cloud comms down. Don't do obviously bad things like host the DB at a different provider than the app server.
You can also mix on-prem/colo with cloud fairly seamlessly if you've built up this way. Cloud makes sense for really small, and for quick changes. Own your hardware when it makes sense. Make the switch when the finances line up with no need to change any software.
Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
My client does this. Really nice if you’re on the East coast. Ireland might have a few morning hours where nothing works in test. India has large chunks of time with the same issue. Surprisingly this hasn’t lead them to mock service locally. They are just less productive.
Why not expand the range? The running of the service can’t be more expensive than the devs right?
I agree - you need a dev environment to do your job. That said, I worked at a place where the AWS dev accounts cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a month - I don't know how many employees were outsourced but no one wanted to pay for the extra uptime of the environments for them.
Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> I amortized servers with an average server lifetime of 3 years That's a mistake.
We used SuperMicro servers and their TCO increased substantially after an average of 36 months. Keep in mind there are environmental issues such as CRAC failures, power stability, back EMF, etc which all harm components. It's very difficult to quantify the server lifetime, you need to be conservative in financial planning and that ended up with a median lifetime of 36MO.
You can get deeper into the weeds and look at Zinc Whiskers and such but that's a niche you just have to generalize.