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

venturebeat.com

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

#81

Post by tluyben2 »

xfitm3 wrote: post #66
faeriechangling wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this core competency stuff a lot and it’s just not so. I need organizations as small as teams of video editors run their own “datacenters” which may consist of as little as a Jellyfin server. A waste of resources? Is centralization into cloud datacenters or even CDNs all the way to the last mile a more efficient use of resources than plugging a 10gig connection into a NAS? Why haven’t all restaurants been dest…

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…

It really depends on your demands; a lot of companies are running 1000s of trivial web applications and that’s it. Those can run on 10 year old servers which cost nothing at all anymore and never break; I have a few racks of them (HP dl360). We have not had issues in our colo for those 10 years; I didn’t even replace a drive and these are mostly spinning.

Sure cloud is easier and if you need things that aws offers then go for it; we run well on a few $100/mo. Our most sold/popular product costs (I did this calc because of another ‘cloud is great’ HN post a few months back) less than $1/mo to host and maintain and has 50k+ active users.

I like and use aws but it makes no sense in many cases; I would rob myself running most of our products on it because they don’t require remotely anything that it offers. I think the ‘make a unicorn’ mindset messed up people’s bottom line understanding; making 10k-100k$ more profit seems pathetic to companies that raised 100m$. Thing is; that is real money and I definitely rather have dinner with my colleagues than send it to Amazon.

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

#82

Post by strawhatguy »

solatic wrote: post #52

Cloud computing made financial control the new engineering. Unless your service is running at an astronomical scale, nobody cares that your refactor saved 50 MB of RAM. The cloud vendors don't care if your workload needs 128 MB RAM, 256 MB RAM, 8 GB RAM. They'll run anything. Just pay for it. The industry is in a weird spot right now where Finance doesn't understand Engineering well enough to provide proper direction…

But do they have to care? The right answer is to set an actual budget. Finance to engineering: you have $x to work with.

Then engineering cares, and the needed talks/concern about resource usage can happen. Part of engineering is optimization, cost is one metric to optimize.

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

#83

Post by fock »

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…

for that price, you probably can buy 3 equivalent machines, a consulting shop to setup redundancy (this thing isn't!), install a living cabin to your colo and have someone sitting there on watch 24/7...

(should have read the licensing issue - still you can buy 2 and the consultant)

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

#84

Post by faeriechangling »

xfitm3 wrote: post #66
faeriechangling wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this core competency stuff a lot and it’s just not so. I need organizations as small as teams of video editors run their own “datacenters” which may consist of as little as a Jellyfin server. A waste of resources? Is centralization into cloud datacenters or even CDNs all the way to the last mile a more efficient use of resources than plugging a 10gig connection into a NAS? Why haven’t all restaurants been dest…

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…

Datacenter skills have NEVER been in more demand, datacenter is BOOMING and even the people who work in the AWS datacenter aren’t doomed to work there for eternity their skills forever captured by big tech. I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about, the skills are out there, they just don’t come cheap. Many businesses at a scale to run their own datacenters are also at a scale to have a relationship with local schools and managers will literally build pipeline of employees and maintain this pipeline for decades. The only staffing issue is these datacenter workers are just making so much money and getting so much work can you afford to hire them during this boom?

Being able to avoid most of the costs and training and staffing you’re talking about has been a thing for a LONG time before the rise of cloud. There’s long been plenty of companies that will run the datacenter infrastructure for you or ever servers and let you hash out the details. People still made their own datacenters and continue to do so to this day. That is not why cloud has been so successful, the biggest thing cloud did to be successful was pioneer a new pay per use business model and the tools to enable it. Later on they created a bunch of new business innovations like EverythingAAS. If those innovations don’t come into play, AWS isn’t more attractive than Hetzner.

I’ve built and decommissioned smaller datacenters for different businesses a bit under 1MW. I’ve seen datacenters make no sense, I’ve seen datacenters make complete sense.

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

#85

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

xfitm3 wrote: post #66
faeriechangling wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this core competency stuff a lot and it’s just not so. I need organizations as small as teams of video editors run their own “datacenters” which may consist of as little as a Jellyfin server. A waste of resources? Is centralization into cloud datacenters or even CDNs all the way to the last mile a more efficient use of resources than plugging a 10gig connection into a NAS? Why haven’t all restaurants been dest…

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…

You don't need to build your own datacenter. Rent a server or a colocation rack in an existing datacenter.

The result will still be orders of magnitude cheaper than AWS.

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

#86

Post by ocdtrekkie »

jrumbut wrote: post #17

The headline would be more accurately stated (according to an image in the article) "81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending growth " The most common response (39%) was the C suite wanted spending to remain the same.

The problem is that if your business is dependent on the cloud, that's not actually your choice: The providers can, and will, change the prices whenever they want. As the crunch comes and even the FAANGs start layoffs, watch how fast buying an in-house VMware stack seems like an absolute bargain, including paying staff to build and maintain it.

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

#88

Post by chx »

solardev wrote: post #22
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.

Their costs plus their profits is still cheaper than hiring your own people to rebuild what they've already done, except taking much longer and usually ending up with worse service. Unless you're an infrastructure or network logistics company, it's a waste of resources to build your own. Cloud services are so commoditized already it's unlikely to be any sort of meaningful differentiator for your company. Especially i…

The thing is, there is an awful lot of YAGNI going on.

Engineering a web app in a way that autoscaling is effective is a lot of work. It is very well possible that renting a beefy dedicated server will do just fine and cost a magnitude or two less in renting and engineering both...

Also, people tend to say I lost my mind when I say complex and expensive high availability solutions are often not worth it: it's cheaper to be down. Because you will be down, no matter what you do, there are a multitude of services you will rely on -- and some downtime is completely expected and accepted in this industry. So adding a few minutes every few years when you need to manually fall over to a slave database versus using a complex HA database solution? A cost-benefit analysis is in order.

If you do need the cloud, yay but so many people no longer even consider whether they do.

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

#89

Post by Closi »

jrumbut wrote: post #17

The headline would be more accurately stated (according to an image in the article) "81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending growth " The most common response (39%) was the C suite wanted spending to remain the same.

IMO I think that headline is less acccurate, because 'reduce growth' means 'grow, but less'.

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

#90

Post by jrumbut »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #86
jrumbut wrote: post #17

The headline would be more accurately stated (according to an image in the article) "81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending growth " The most common response (39%) was the C suite wanted spending to remain the same.

The problem is that if your business is dependent on the cloud, that's not actually your choice: The providers can, and will, change the prices whenever they want. As the crunch comes and even the FAANGs start layoffs, watch how fast buying an in-house VMware stack seems like an absolute bargain, including paying staff to build and maintain it.

I don't necessarily disagree. I've always felt that there was a lot to be said for not becoming dependent on the latest and greatest features of any specific cloud. If you're pushing the limits of some service you probably want to own it.

But my real gripe is that this survey is being presented as doom and gloom when you could equally summarize the results as "about 60% of IT leaders directed to stay the course or beef up cloud spending"

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