4 ms·

I don't have first hand knowledge but my understanding is large companies have procurement departments and they get over half off sticker price for Azure. My gu

by pooper 5y ago

I don't have first hand knowledge but my understanding is large companies have procurement departments and they get over half off sticker price for Azure. My guess is this is why the sticker price needs to be overinflated because people in procurement need to show that they are doing their jobs. Also it is a major pain point getting anything done with IT operations. Like the Oracle database server that half the department relies on stops responding on a Friday morning and it takes all day to determine the hard disk is full and fix it. I had never before worked at a company where this happened multiple times. Or operations saying they were unable to restore a windows server hosting a database server and now everyone has to scramble to update their connection strings because operations somehow cannot use the same domain name for the new machine.

vidarh 5y ago
It's true there are huge rebates to be had if you're big enough, which is one thing smaller companies should bear in mind when they look at big company X using cloud provider Y as justification for thinking Y must be cheap. If you're Netflix, cloud is probably not that much more expensive than owning your own servers. Maybe even cheaper. But you're not getting Netflix prices. But even if you're small fry you should however start regularly talking to your provider and go through a regular cost-cutting exercise and talk to them about how you're looking at provider Z and have been asked to cost out managed servers and on prem options.... You won't need to get very big before that starts paying off. If your competition is doing this and you're not, and hosting costs starts becoming a big part of your cost base, you won't be able to compete. Long term I think we're going to see disruption here to the point of startups failing because of competitors copying their idea but being better at driving down hosting costs by not being afraid of going to dedicated hosting or hybrid solutions (hybrids are my favourite - if your stack can be deployed semi-transparently both on dedicated servers and cloud you can go much closer to the wire on your dedicated servers by being prepared to spin up cloud instances to take care of spikes; ironically having the ability to spin up cloud instances makes relying on cloud services even less cost-effective) I'd also expect to see more "hybrid" cloud offerings with companies offering you operations-as-a-service by giving you a virtual cloud type interface where they don't actually own a cloud service themselves but helps you abstract away cheaper hosting providers. You can already find plenty of people who'll e.g. run Kubernetes setups for you, so taking the step to do more cost-optimization on the backend is natural (and I'm sure there are people who'd do this for you today - if I was still doing contracting I certainly would be offering that - and maybe someone is already wrapping it up as a service offering; I haven't kept up on that market)

by pooper 5y ago

vidarh 5y ago

It's true there are huge rebates to be had if you're big enough, which is one thing smaller companies should bear in mind when they look at big company X using cloud provider Y as justification for thinking Y must be cheap. If you're Netflix, cloud is probably not that much more expensive than owning your own servers. Maybe even cheaper. But you're not getting Netflix prices. But even if you're small fry you should however start regularly talking to your provider and go through a regular cost-cutting exercise and talk to them about how you're looking at provider Z and have been asked to cost out managed servers and on prem options.... You won't need to get very big before that starts paying off. If your competition is doing this and you're not, and hosting costs starts becoming a big part of your cost base, you won't be able to compete. Long term I think we're going to see disruption here to the point of startups failing because of competitors copying their idea but being better at driving down hosting costs by not being afraid of going to dedicated hosting or hybrid solutions (hybrids are my favourite - if your stack can be deployed semi-transparently both on dedicated servers and cloud you can go much closer to the wire on your dedicated servers by being prepared to spin up cloud instances to take care of spikes; ironically having the ability to spin up cloud instances makes relying on cloud services even less cost-effective) I'd also expect to see more "hybrid" cloud offerings with companies offering you operations-as-a-service by giving you a virtual cloud type interface where they don't actually own a cloud service themselves but helps you abstract away cheaper hosting providers. You can already find plenty of people who'll e.g. run Kubernetes setups for you, so taking the step to do more cost-optimization on the backend is natural (and I'm sure there are people who'd do this for you today - if I was still doing contracting I certainly would be offering that - and maybe someone is already wrapping it up as a service offering; I haven't kept up on that market)