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81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending

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Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending

#71

Post by kumarvvr »

userbinator wrote: post #15

Marketing can only go so far. Are more people finally starting to take their heads out of the cloud? Not only do cloud providers need to pay their own costs, they also need to make a profit on top of that; thus, if one thinks critically, the only time renting can be cheaper than owning is if it's short-term.

The cloud is much more than that. The premium you pay for a cloud service is

  - Ability to scale up and scale down in a matter of minutes.
  - Reduction in variable capital costs required to meet peak demand.
  - Ability to test and prototype products or services at scale without significant investments.
  - Ability to have, on tap, products and services that in a traditional sense, would take a lot of time and manpower (A company can invest in equipment and manpower to spin a few services. But as you add more services, it costs more and more to build and maintain such systems. With cloud services, you can use, test and experiment before finalizing)

Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending

#72

Post by paranoidrobot »

aamoscodes wrote: post #50
paranoidrobot wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's various levels of foot-gun clicks that can generate AWS bills many orders of magnitude larger. Reserved Instances are a really quick and easy way to blow a few million with one click. Europe (Frankfurt), 3 year, all-upfront, Windows w/ SQL Enterprise, Dedicated Tenancy, u-12tb1.112xlarge instance at $5,926,378 up-front. The discounted $225/hour rate for it disappears into the background noise. (No, I'm not wi…

You can increase it to $6,070,809.96 by not paying upfront, or an order of magnitude more by just buying it on-demand and not checking your bill for 3 years (not recommended).

My comment was more about the 1-click-major-spend aspect. You can always terminate a normal instance - refunding a RI purchase is going to require a lot more explanation and dealing with support/finance/lawyers.

Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending

#73

Post by biggc »

paranoidrobot wrote: post #37
sgtnoodle wrote: post #10

I have access to a button that I can trivially press, that a coworker recently told me generates a $50 AWS bill.

There's various levels of foot-gun clicks that can generate AWS bills many orders of magnitude larger. Reserved Instances are a really quick and easy way to blow a few million with one click. Europe (Frankfurt), 3 year, all-upfront, Windows w/ SQL Enterprise, Dedicated Tenancy, u-12tb1.112xlarge instance at $5,926,378 up-front. The discounted $225/hour rate for it disappears into the background noise. (No, I'm not wi…

Wow! I was trying to find those numbers and the highest I could get to was ~899k. Then I switched to the OS to Windows from Linux. That licensing fee is wild!

Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending

#74

Post by gw99 »

bradleyjg wrote: post #70
deathanatos wrote: post #23

How many would say this normally? I.e., what's the baseline? Meanwhile, how many are giving their teams the resources (i.e., people) necessary to do the analytics on the bill required to find & cut costs? Every cloud I've worked with has been terrible at billing in a way that could be reasonable investigated. At one point we literally pulled all the billing data into a SQLite database. (And that was a great idea, as…

But how does it take a over week to answer the question? In my experience it takes azure support over a week to answer any question. Unless the question happens to be which person without a substantial update is taking over the case. You’ll get lots and lots of those answers.

If it's any consolation it's not much better on the AWS side. We are currently waiting for them to fix something which they recently broke but some dude is on holiday. I suspect he's the only dude who knows how it works. Even our account managers can't seem to brow beat anyone into fixing it.

Someone else's computer has been painful and very expensive for our organisation so far. Escalating costs aren't even the worst problem.

Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending

#75

Post by gw99 »

hotpotamus wrote: post #69
deathanatos wrote: post #23

How many would say this normally? I.e., what's the baseline? Meanwhile, how many are giving their teams the resources (i.e., people) necessary to do the analytics on the bill required to find & cut costs? Every cloud I've worked with has been terrible at billing in a way that could be reasonable investigated. At one point we literally pulled all the billing data into a SQLite database. (And that was a great idea, as…

> Every cloud I've worked with has been terrible at billing in a way that could be reasonable investigated. Terrible for who? You or the cloud provider? I'm a bit of a worrier (and not a perfect coder), so infinite scalability with utility billing combined with a mistake on my part could result in an epic bill. All I'll say is that I won't practice cloud development on my own credit card.

It's terrible for you every time. we leak $100k a month into Bezos' pockets on a regular basis. Sleep well.

Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending

#77

Post by abofh »

noduerme wrote: post #48
deathanatos wrote: post #23

How many would say this normally? I.e., what's the baseline? Meanwhile, how many are giving their teams the resources (i.e., people) necessary to do the analytics on the bill required to find & cut costs? Every cloud I've worked with has been terrible at billing in a way that could be reasonable investigated. At one point we literally pulled all the billing data into a SQLite database. (And that was a great idea, as…

I manage one midsized company's set of cloud resources that I'm pretty sure could be reduced by 40% in cost or more if they were willing to take a 3 year advanced reserve. The problem is I can't get a handle on how much their infrastructure will or won't need to scale in the next three years, since they themselves don't know. There's always some new deal around the corner that would require scaling up. On top of that…

So there are three choices, essentially to argue over:

- run on demand instances (maybe mix in spot)

- run fargate instances (maybe mix in spot)

- reserve them.

Every company hates #3, but it's usually the best choice if you can't go spot - you can swap them within the family for size, use them for baseline, it's fine. You're incorporated right? So if you fold, it's just another debt on the pile, stop worrying. Go no upfront if you really want to avoid the cash outlay, or go spot if you can defend limited outages.

Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending

#78

Post by pbowyer »

ryandrake wrote: post #14

I wonder if companies are 1. actually seeing economic difficulty and responding by cutting costs, or 2. imagining/predicting a slowdown, responding to their imagined/predicted slowdown by cutting costs, thereby causing an actual slowdown.

There's a third reason for companies outside the USA who buy cloud services in USD - the strengthening dollar/falling exchange rates means everything is more expensive so to keep the budget the same you have to cut usage.

Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending

#79

Post by burritosnob »

silisili wrote: post #40

I'd argue more than 81% of teams are way, way overspending on resume padding cloud stuff. My last company had all the AWS goodies, spending thousands per month...on a site that got around 50 hits a day.

I run a small consulting practice and we have pivoted almost exclusively to helping customers reduce cloud spend. Across 100+ engagements, with cloud spend raging from $500k-$40M per year, I can confidently state the following:

>90% of companies are overspending on cloud resources. On average, 30-40% depending on provider (AWS is typically the worst).

>75% of IT/Engineering teams have overbuilt their environments to leverage the latest & greatest tech stacks / toolsets with no justifiable business need.

>50% will confidently state they have “optimized” their environment and in almost every case there is money being left on the table. We have only engaged with one customer that we couldn’t offer savings. They spend $30M+ per year on AWS and had a full time staff of 3 engineers solely focused on cost optimization.

>50% of IT / Engineering leaders became incredibly defensive when presented with savings analysis which almost always included reduction in technical complexity of stack. We have since pivoted and marketing/engaging almost exclusively to CEO/CFO as first contact.

>50% of companies had one of more cloud costing/monitoring tools in place that was not being leveraged, or worse, gamed to produce inaccurate reports.

Re: 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending

#80

Post by kavalg »

lupire wrote: post #16
userbinator wrote: post #15

Marketing can only go so far. Are more people finally starting to take their heads out of the cloud? Not only do cloud providers need to pay their own costs, they also need to make a profit on top of that; thus, if one thinks critically, the only time renting can be cheaper than owning is if it's short-term.

Do you also grow your own food to avoid the overhead of paying farmer and grocer?

yes, and not for the cost savings, but for the quality that I can't get at any commercial farmer
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