61–70 of 126 posts
Price has little to do with cost. Price should be the maximum the market can afford while still beating ones competition.
This is such a frustrating perspective. I have so much respect for people who build projects and companies with a profit margin that lets them earn a comfortable living, without trying to extract as much as they possibly can from everyone around them.
Long term rug pull on CTOs who thought the cloud would somehow be better, easier & cheaper. CTOs get lots of free credits, downsize their infra staffing. Start using the basic building blocks, but then of the basic building blocks (servers & storage) are marked up and expensive. Next, to find cost savings their org need to move deeper and deeper into alphabet soup of cloud vendor proprietary stack, at which point the…
They’re even more locked into cloud now than it seems because not only have they shut down their in house ops but they’ve lost the skills and the work force. Now SaaS and cloud is free to squeeze as hard as they want. The lock in is strong. Saw this coming miles away. Nobody listened of course. This industry worships fads. When the buzz becomes “everyone is doing X” it becomes truly hard not to do it too. All your bo…
On the other hand now they are free to concentrate their labor on their core business and competencies. Why on earth would they want to tie up payroll and benefits on people running the company email?
Turns out building massive workforces on top of software business that don't require them isn't good business. The big mistake most companies made is that they applied the old-school "Fortune 500" way of company building to software businesses (i.e., bigger is better). Humorous, because the promise of software was that it reduced the need for that behavior. The end result is that they've built companies which ironica…
It would be interesting to see what the corresponding figures are like for on-prem, although they would be much more difficult to calculate and would vary wildly between companies. The only thing that really stood out to me was the Google storage price increase, which seems rather large, as in way out of line in comparison to our 2023 spend and 2024 budgeting. It would also be nice to see what exactly is meant by Saa…
I did a detailed price cost calculation of onprem vs AWS as I worked at a MSP. Our cost of compute and storage including DC construction over 10y was about half the cost of AWS. We also used cheap supermicro and had no service contracts or warranties we had on site staff. Their salaries were included. Small DC 2mw.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So if you pay for 1GB of storage, they probably actually store 5GB of data or more for you The actual factor is most likely around 1.4-1.5x and for sure can’t be any more than 2.2x in this day and age. Dumbest possible implementation will be “only” 3x so no it’s nowhere close to 5gb Edit: looks like it’s public so i can actually tell you that google uses RS 3,2 which gives 1.5 replication factor. When i was there a…
But thats within one cell... But data will be stored in more than one cell to deal with scheduled and unscheduled downtime of the cell...
Long term rug pull on CTOs who thought the cloud would somehow be better, easier & cheaper. CTOs get lots of free credits, downsize their infra staffing. Start using the basic building blocks, but then of the basic building blocks (servers & storage) are marked up and expensive. Next, to find cost savings their org need to move deeper and deeper into alphabet soup of cloud vendor proprietary stack, at which point the…
They’re even more locked into cloud now than it seems because not only have they shut down their in house ops but they’ve lost the skills and the work force. Now SaaS and cloud is free to squeeze as hard as they want. The lock in is strong. Saw this coming miles away. Nobody listened of course. This industry worships fads. When the buzz becomes “everyone is doing X” it becomes truly hard not to do it too. All your bo…
For example, you can't lose data in the cloud. There are very much operational mistakes you can make with combinations of S3 settings around versioning and deletes, that result in permanent irretrievable dataloss.
My last shop managed to do this and then was implementing some sort of cloud data backup scheme.. in the cloud, lol.
The other assumption is that sure compute is costly, but since you can spin it up&down you'll save so much. As it turns out, most apps, most of the time, do not have bursty use cases that merit paying 2-3x for compute in hopes of spinning it down when idle. The funny thing is the same people selling this line are also the ones telling you to negotiate savings with some of those annual agreements that require a minimum amount of compute/spend.
The last one is assumptions about hockey stick compute growth needs, and that of course choosing AWS will make this easier than having to constantly procure servers. Maybe! But few have hockey stick compute growth needs for long. And it's not that impossible to trade your servers out every 18 months to get your compute density growth. And you aren't always guaranteed AWS compute at prices you want, as we've seen shortages of certain classes compute and needs to reserve up front, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did a detailed price cost calculation of onprem vs AWS as I worked at a MSP. Our cost of compute and storage including DC construction over 10y was about half the cost of AWS. We also used cheap supermicro and had no service contracts or warranties we had on site staff. Their salaries were included. Small DC 2mw.
If you can afford to build a data center and know you have that fixed amount of capacity for 10y then you’re not talking about 99.99% of businesses. For everyone else the cloud is cheaper. In fact, to your customers, you are the cloud, so I’m not sure what you are arguing.
The parent wondered:
> It would be interesting to see what the corresponding figures are like for on-prem
They replied. Not everything is an argument.
Also, they didn't say anything about fixed capacity - they're likely just talking about 10Y deprecation which is a very common accounting thing to use - and "For everyone else the cloud is cheaper" is definitely not true. It depends on workload and architecture. If you're in the business of selling infrastructure, for example, using the cloud will eat most of your margins (this is not to say that it's not done, but usually there's some caveats, e.g. maybe you will get some cheap VMs provisioned and do your own fleet management ontop instead of building everything on top of say, firebase or dynamodb).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They’re even more locked into cloud now than it seems because not only have they shut down their in house ops but they’ve lost the skills and the work force. Now SaaS and cloud is free to squeeze as hard as they want. The lock in is strong. Saw this coming miles away. Nobody listened of course. This industry worships fads. When the buzz becomes “everyone is doing X” it becomes truly hard not to do it too. All your bo…
> They’re even more locked into cloud now than it seems because not only have they shut down their in house ops but they’ve lost the skills and the work force. On the other hand now they are free to concentrate their labor on their core business and competencies. Why on earth would they want to tie up payroll and benefits on people running the company email?
Large software companies still hire their own accountants and lawyers and HR correct? And this is largely expected and understood to be a requirement. Why should IT be any different?
Once you hit a certain size, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to say something like "let's outsource our IT, they are distracting me from focusing on our core competencies". You should have a CIO/CTO and a whole bunch of other people to be distracted for you. In fact, that's kind of the purpose of having an IT department, so that you can focus on your core competencies rather than keeping up to speed on the latest changes to AWS services or whatever.
This is weighted of course. The more your industry requires competent IT, the larger a % your company should probably be handling in house because then it is a part of what should be considered your core competencies if you want to stay around for very long.
So, after all these years of hearing "who cares about performance and cost - just buy more engineers, CPU, and memory", gravity is once again being the bitch that it is.