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How the UK's Home Office reduced its cloud costs by 40%

• nn3 7y ago
  ...which currently make up about 30% of the compute powering their non-production containerised clusters...the department paid approximately 80% less for cloud resources by using excess capacity services. Must be a weird pricing scheme if doing something to 30% of your compute saves 80% of the cost. The numbers don't look quite right.
  • sputknick 7y ago
    I think from the terminology they use they they are on GCP, where they sell their preemptible instances at 80% off the normal cost. The numbers are right, the language is a bit off.
• sputknick 7y ago
  Nothin here is remarkable, you could even get these from the CSPs websites. What is remarkable (unfortunately) is that a large enterprise is going to this effort to optimize their cloud architecture. Far too many enterprises move to the cloud, without taking advantage of the flexibility the cloud offers, then claim something is wrong with the cloud. Kudos to the British government for encouraging this.
• ptah 7y ago
  nothing really groundbreaking here
• londons_explore 7y ago
  As soon as management starts looking at optimizing efficiency numbers like "Average CPU utilisation" a smart developer starts to run low priority "while(true);" loops to make CPU utilisation higher. Instead management should be looking at the cost of running a service, and ignoring efficiency or utilisation numbers. It turns out basic things like enabling caching in the application can have a far bigger resource saving than stopping the test VM's over the weekend.
• pjc50 7y ago
  GDS are excellent: they are the "internal consultant" organization aiming to bring up the standard of computing in UK public services without handing huge amounts of money to exploitative external firms. The Home Office handles immigration in the same way that America's "ICE" does, with all that implies.