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Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

businessinsider.com

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Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#241

Post by burtonator »

Someone1234 wrote: post #14

I think a strong argument can be made either way. There's definitely financial savings to be had by doing it in-house (either literally or utilizing existing data centers as here). But what I've experienced is that companies are often attracted to Big Cloud™ not just for financial reasons but to flatten/simplify their corporate reporting structure. It is the ultimate delegation. This isn't simply about having fewer s…

There's also the argument that can be made for rapid iteration.

A company like BoA will eventually choke until this in the future.

Also, this stuff sounds great until you need improved peering, or software-defined networks or massive bandwidth improvements, etc.

... and I get that the HN community is clever but banks and other institutions like this REALLY struggle to find this talent.

$2B is a lot except when you're losing $10B a year in revenue because you can't compete in the market.

In a way this would be like Amazon arguing it should build its own bank. It's not what they're good at... Focus on your strengths.

Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#243

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

pentae wrote: post #84
ddorian43 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can rent dedicated server or onprem ? people always go from cloud to building your own cpu in these threads, never in the middle

Yeah we literally turned our $7k a month AWS bill into $1k a month by changing to 3 dedicated servers (Fully managed!) and cloudflare. It's better in every conceivable way.

For anyone doing this... look around.

Tooling has only improved.

We were able to cram a large set of applications into a group of instances using CapRover.

Instead of 2-3 instances, and a whole bunch of RDS, we ended just recreating the databases there along with minio for storage (we write a small amount of data to S3 storage).

Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#245

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

hitekker wrote: post #230
nwallin wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

probability - Odds of a project being a success at achieving it's goals.

impact risk - Odds of a project failure causing large impact to company.

Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#246

Post by greglindahl »

weberc2 wrote: post #209
learc83 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Auto manufacturers use machines built by other businesses and parts built by other businesses. Yeah but they generally aren't renting those machines. Renting critical pieces of business infrastructure that aren't easily replaceable is opening yourself up to rent seeking on the part of your supplier. Remember the Oracle business model--lock people in and then keep raising the price just below what it would cost to r…

Why is it better to be locked into your own company’s IT department rather than AWS? I would argue AWS gives a better ROI than 95% of corporate IT departments, and generally less hostile to boot.

One hopes you're not arguing that companies shouldn't bother trying to figure out if they're in the 95% or the 5%.

Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#248

Post by hnick »

aeturnum wrote: post #98
trabant00 wrote: post #56

Earlier 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…

> This is a myth directly from cloud providers marketing campaigns I agree the cloud providers like this idea, but I'm not sure I agree it's a myth. Businesses need to choose what competencies to focus on. For nearly every other area, businesses rely on suppliers. Auto manufacturers use machines built by other businesses and parts built by other businesses. They also obviously do some amount of in-house part and tool…

I think a company that saves $2B (meaning they were able and willing to spend even more before they had this idea) is more than able to have multiple competencies. Acquisition and vertical integration is how many companies became massive.

Of course it's a question of scale, but a lot of arguments I've seen usually come down to CapEx vs OpEx accounting which is silly because a dollar is a dollar.

Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#249

Post by coredog64 »

hinkley wrote: post #160
petarb wrote: post #114

“Right now, the bank estimates its private cloud is 25 to 30% cheaper than public providers, though it also recognizes that probably won't last forever.”

After a meetup this spring, someone talked my ear off about how Dell is highly motivated to have a private cloud solution that works for people. Having Dell and Amazon in a bidding war over your next project is probably the best world you can be in. For my money, you should run one data center in the same location with most of your tech talent, and a second one geographically distant, and regionally load balanced. Bu…

Unfortunately, Dell’s private cloud solution exists today, and it’s an 18 layer shit sandwich of all the disparate companies that Michael Dell has stitched together into his holding empire.

Re: Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud

#250

Post by coredog64 »

crawdog wrote: post #107

"Building its own cloud" = leasing data centers from Equinix or other large data center providers. Financial services have challenges using public cloud due to regulatory and compliance requirements. Most of these challenges are self made - artifacts of moving their teams from "This is how we currently do it" to a shared services model. Curious if they are all in on providers like Redhat Openshift or Pivotal Cloud Fo…

Given how little money Pivotal was making from Cloud Foundry and how expensive each license was, I’d bet a large sum that the answer is no.

(Some context: My last employer had an AWS bill of about $3m/year that was mostly EC2. Running PCF on top of that would have been another $2m/year in licensing. And that was after the volume discount.)

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