61–70 of 321 posts
> "Now, it's pared that down to 70,000 servers, of which 8,000 of those are handling the bulk of the load." I wonder what the other 62000 servers are doing.
You’re also neglecting TTM as a consideration. As an example, I’m stuck having to wait 6 weeks to get new hardware provisioned into an available slot in one of my data centers to spin up a new Hadoop cluster, something my team could probably do in a couple of hours in the cloud. That being said, we control the HW and SW stacks end to end so I don’t have to worry as much about the nightmare scenarios the NordVPN folks…
So much of the Fortune 500 lust for public cloud seems to come down to working around inefficient IT procurement and provisioning processes. They haven't automated, they don't maintain enough excess capacity, they haven't managed vendor relationships to assure fast order turn-around, financial controls are too onerous, etc.
Everything's virtualized but otherwise they're still operating like it's 1995.
This is completely false - I imagine they didn't take into account how much the migration and upkeep actually cost them. AWS's promise is not that its infrastructure itself is cheaper in terms of number of servers, or otherwise. Its cheaper in that it helps automate a lot of manual things away.
I had experience in Quartz (BofA cloud), and deploying is 100 times easier than AWS, everything is automated. Imagine building a cloud service where you trust all your clients, and all must share the same information if they have the correct auth, what I trying to say is that their use-case actually made it simpler, that's where the savings in software had came from.
> "Now, it's pared that down to 70,000 servers, of which 8,000 of those are handling the bulk of the load." I wonder what the other 62000 servers are doing.
Obviously small businesses don't have the option of building their own cloud, but there is a middle ground: use public clouds, but avoid coupling yourself to them. Most cloud providers provide servers that can be treated like a barebones Linux server, and that's all you really need to be productive with most server applications.
Last time someone had to perform hardware maintenance was at least 3 months ago. If you're small enough (20-30 servers for us) the things mostly run themselves. Any other overhead we have would be present if we were just using something like EC2.
The bulk of our hardware is 10 years old. We have some servers that are 17 years old and still chugging along.
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…
> 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…
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…
Yeah but you don’t need data center engineers, real estate specialists. Power specialists. Etc.