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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

#91

Post by mkhpalm »

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…

> we've had a support ticket open w/ Azure for 9 days now asking "where did this $1k go?". Our Blob Storage "Cool" tier costs upticked, and I'm 99% sure the bill there is just wrong.

Check your partial / interrupted multi-part uploads. If its like amazon the uncommitted blobs won't show up in storage graphs but you'll be getting charged for them just sitting there.

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

#92

Post by sofixa »

oatmeal_croc wrote: post #47

"further 29% noting they’ve switched public cloud providers in the first half of 2022 due to high prices" Wait, what? There's no way 29% of companies noped their way out of cloud provider lock-in. Not saying it doesn't happen, but 29% is a huge number. Unless of course they're startups with no idea how they want their infrastructure run or legacy companies dipping their feet (?) in the cloud for the first time.

More and more companies (newer ones of course, those unburned by legacy) use public clouds as "managed Kubernetes and maybe a few other things like a database, load balancer, object storage". That way there is close to no lock-in, so the biggest challenge in switching clouds would be how to migrate the data and do the failover with minimal downtime.

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

#93

Post by pid-1 »

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…

> where the money is going

AWS in particular is handsomely engineered so you can't answer this sort of question, as well as making people spend more without need.

- Per resource cost is turned off by default. Turning it on costs money. How much? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

- Services like S3 will bill you per API call. How do you know who is calling your APIs? Using Cloud trail, which is turned off by default. Turning it on for this sort of analysis might cost a lot $$$ for a reasonably used bucket.

- CloudWatch will bill you per custom metric and adds up quickly. Why do I have so many custom metrics? Good luck finding out.

- Many costs are tied with stuff that's really hard to control e.g. egress traffic.

- Using many accounts is by far the best way to segregate unrelated projects. But then, you will end up paying for many criminally underutilized NAT GWs, VPN connections, Load Balancers, etc...

- Many services are ha, multi az only. That makes AWS unnecessarily expensive for dev environments / non critical services.

The list goes on. I know a fair number of consulting companies making the money of their lives reducing AWS bills.

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

#94

Post by sofixa »

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.

> 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

People often say this, but it's just not true. First, any company with significant spend has custom deals with custom pricing in exchange for a commit. Second, even if you don't have that, there's often reserved/"savings plans"/whatever where you commit in exchange for a lower price.

Third, the only time any of the big 3 cloud providers has increased pricing (it usually only goes down) is when GCP increased bandwidth and storage costs a few months ago. AWS, which is what the majority of the market uses, has only decreased prices, hundreds of times.

Regarding VMware, you know you have to pay for licenses and support in an ongoing manner and they are known to jack up prices, right? Furthermore, VMware's software is a dumpster fire that gets you around 5% of what you get from a serious public cloud. Maybe 30%-50% if you go in with NSX and vSAN and the vSuite where you lock in yourself to terrible software with the wrong abstractions, lack of APIs, at enormous inflexible costs. How is that any better?

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

#95

Post by phamilton »

godisdad wrote: post #76

The solution never tried: share the spoils of efficiency with your teams. Give them a percentage or even a few basis points of what they save back as charitable contributions to an organization of their choice. Watch how fast the bill will go down

At Yahoo in 2015 we had the CFO challenge: find cost savings and get a bonus up to $50k. I think it was $1k per $100k in annual savings.

One guy turned off staging at night and saved $600k/yr.

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

#96

Post by pid-1 »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #58

Incomming, the submarine articles telling you that bare metal is back and that it was cool to setup your monolith with vertical scaling all along.

As much as I love shitting on AWS, at this point I would just retire if I ever need to interact with a server vendor again.

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

#97

Post by sofixa »

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.

> if one thinks critically, the only time renting can be cheaper than owning is if it's short-term.

If you skip economies of scale that is. AWS, Azure and GCP allow you to use stuff that has cost billions of man hours and matériel to develop and deploy. How much would it cost you to build a global network? A globally distributed DB? Custom ARM/Tensor chips which come out much cheaper than mainstream alternatives for some workloads?

If all you need is to host a few apps in a narrow geographic area, or do compute/graphics intensive stuff on an inflexible scale, it will probably cost less over a long period of time (3-5 years). But it's still much more inflexible, time consuming and hard. You need to hire the right people and they need the time to order, configure and deploy all that infrastructure.

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

#98

Post by vjk800 »

godisdad wrote: post #76

The solution never tried: share the spoils of efficiency with your teams. Give them a percentage or even a few basis points of what they save back as charitable contributions to an organization of their choice. Watch how fast the bill will go down

Do this and now you also have an incentive to first spend money frivolously so that "savings" can later be easily found.

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

#99

Post by jiggawatts »

burritosnob wrote: post #79
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…

I can confirm having had a similar experience, albeit at a smaller scale (fewer customers but similar annual spend.)

My favourite find was a database backup someone configured where it was keeping full uncompressed daily backups forever. Fixing just that cut their spend by $100K annually, and then we kept going.

The worst offenders are governments, especially in some countries that haven't had sufficiently brutal economic downturns recently to force anyone to do some belt tightening. Australian government is spectacularly wasteful, burning piles of money in the cloud for services that only malicious bots ever visit.

Like you said, these places love to pad out there resumes at the expense of the taxpayer. I regularly see multiple Kubernetes clusters deployed for one web app. Or architecture diagrams that look like a spiderweb of connecte d systems for something that should be running on a single VM.

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

#100

Post by molsongolden »

godisdad wrote: post #76

The solution never tried: share the spoils of efficiency with your teams. Give them a percentage or even a few basis points of what they save back as charitable contributions to an organization of their choice. Watch how fast the bill will go down

TripActions does this savings sharing when booking travel.

Any other similar platforms out there?

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