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I ,for one, welcome our new IT overlords, the AWS/GCP/Azure. The old overlords of IT, the IT infrastructure depts, were too slow and bureacratic and lacked elas

I ,for one, welcome our new IT overlords, the AWS/GCP/Azure. The old overlords of IT, the IT infrastructure depts, were too slow and bureacratic and lacked elasticity. For example, if I wanted to spin up a few servers with Cassandra -- I would have to undergo rounds of review for approval of a new technology then work on requisitioning the h/w or VM, and figure out support chain-of-escalation. Also somehow , on-premise VM were always crashing or running out or disk space. With the new overlords, I have to pass through fewer reviews (I work in financial sector; we love review meetings and gates.) and provisioning a service is as simple as a AWS/GCP/Azure url. And tearing down stuff is easier. The old overlords of IT would be pissed if we decided we did not need a h/w server and we would have to fill out questionaires to determine how we could have been so misguided and then I had to wear my dunce hat for any meeting we would have for the next requisition. I love the battle of cloud computing. With the big three, they are still hold too much power. I look forward to the day when Vultr, DigitalOcean, Ovh, Linode can get approved to be used in my employer's IT stack. With Terraform or Kubernetes, I would be able change our dev/qa/uat cloud environments at will and this will force the Big Three to lower their prices even more.

8ytecoder 5y ago
Not to mention, the upfront budget for hardware or servers were passed to the team requesting a small portion of it if it's the first team to do that.
jrochkind1 5y ago
It's interesting that they decided setting up a cloud server did not require the same level of review. That does not seem exactly like the result of a technical difference.
- manishsharan 5y ago
  When you bring in a new technology or capacity to on-premise, you would want to maximize the bang for the buck which means that you want to review your roadmaps to see who else could benefit from the new technology or capaciy. For Cloud services, this is not really required. Also, there is a level of trust with the Big Three meaning that we can trust that they will be able to manage SQL,Cassandra etc with ease; this IT departmens do not have the manpower bandwidth to keep on adding new servers or services. Hence some of reveiws are not really required.
- Spivak 5y ago
  The difference is that your local IT team is overworked, understaffed (yay IT is a cost center), and bears the full deployment and ongoing monitoring and maintenance responsibility. In new cloud land you're essentially contracting out a team at Amazon to handle all that. You can rent a team that is dedicated to that one particular service. In cloud land behind every service there is a whole team of people dedicated to maintaining that particular service, in on-prem land behind every service is a 1/20th of the capacity of your IT team.
- Aperocky 5y ago
  Because if you didn't need it you can just shut it down. Lot harder to refund that new server that was just installed on the rack.
123pie123 5y ago
and what happens when your new overlords decide that your version OS of choice is now EOL?
- manishsharan 5y ago
  OS currency is a big deal for us in Banking. The Cloud vendor maintaining the OS currency and patches will save us so much headaches. Its entirely possible that version x of a custom application requires version q of the OS but the Cloud vendor is mandating version r of the OS. In this case we get to go back to business and app teams and force them to either upgrade their software or containerized or retire their app. Without this stick, we would be stuck with apps untouched , not- maintained and vulnerable forever.
  - 123pie123 5y ago
    I doubt it will save anything, I would say the lack of flexibility will highly likely cause massive headaches as applications just suddenly stop working, as will having patches forced on you. This stuff has nothing to do with cloud but mainly on how the business thinks off and controls IT. Some finance businesses have the resourses to hand to compete with the cloud providers or at least create internal self managed equivalent
hintymad 5y ago
It's also about unreasonable productivity of APIs. EC2 (with autoscaling groups) + VPC + S3 + SQS + DynamoDB can blow the productivity of most IT department out of water. Let's face it: most of engineers have no clue or stamina to build something even remotely resembling S3 or SQS.
ip26 5y ago
Not to mention simple incentives. IT is frequently thought of as a cost center. AWS is a selling product.

8ytecoder 5y ago

Not to mention, the upfront budget for hardware or servers were passed to the team requesting a small portion of it if it's the first team to do that.

jrochkind1 5y ago

It's interesting that they decided setting up a cloud server did not require the same level of review. That does not seem exactly like the result of a technical difference.

manishsharan 5y ago
When you bring in a new technology or capacity to on-premise, you would want to maximize the bang for the buck which means that you want to review your roadmaps to see who else could benefit from the new technology or capaciy. For Cloud services, this is not really required. Also, there is a level of trust with the Big Three meaning that we can trust that they will be able to manage SQL,Cassandra etc with ease; this IT departmens do not have the manpower bandwidth to keep on adding new servers or services. Hence some of reveiws are not really required.
Spivak 5y ago
The difference is that your local IT team is overworked, understaffed (yay IT is a cost center), and bears the full deployment and ongoing monitoring and maintenance responsibility. In new cloud land you're essentially contracting out a team at Amazon to handle all that. You can rent a team that is dedicated to that one particular service. In cloud land behind every service there is a whole team of people dedicated to maintaining that particular service, in on-prem land behind every service is a 1/20th of the capacity of your IT team.
Aperocky 5y ago
Because if you didn't need it you can just shut it down. Lot harder to refund that new server that was just installed on the rack.

123pie123 5y ago

and what happens when your new overlords decide that your version OS of choice is now EOL?

manishsharan 5y ago
OS currency is a big deal for us in Banking. The Cloud vendor maintaining the OS currency and patches will save us so much headaches. Its entirely possible that version x of a custom application requires version q of the OS but the Cloud vendor is mandating version r of the OS. In this case we get to go back to business and app teams and force them to either upgrade their software or containerized or retire their app. Without this stick, we would be stuck with apps untouched , not- maintained and vulnerable forever.
- 123pie123 5y ago
  I doubt it will save anything, I would say the lack of flexibility will highly likely cause massive headaches as applications just suddenly stop working, as will having patches forced on you. This stuff has nothing to do with cloud but mainly on how the business thinks off and controls IT. Some finance businesses have the resourses to hand to compete with the cloud providers or at least create internal self managed equivalent

hintymad 5y ago

It's also about unreasonable productivity of APIs. EC2 (with autoscaling groups) + VPC + S3 + SQS + DynamoDB can blow the productivity of most IT department out of water. Let's face it: most of engineers have no clue or stamina to build something even remotely resembling S3 or SQS.

ip26 5y ago

Not to mention simple incentives. IT is frequently thought of as a cost center. AWS is a selling product.