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There's not a company in the world that spends more than $1m annually on cloud costs that has saved money by doing so. You don't go to the cloud to save money,

by tinco 4y ago

There's not a company in the world that spends more than $1m annually on cloud costs that has saved money by doing so. You don't go to the cloud to save money, you go to the cloud to reduce technological risk. If you go to the cloud you don't need to fire anyone for choosing IBM, you're not getting strangled by any Oracle contracts, you're not gonna lose all your data because of security holes in your use of Microsoft products. You're also not going to be dealing with downtime because you couldn't find staff talented off to properly configure your Cisco networking equipment. Your system administrators department is not gonna block any innovative employee initiatives because of the strain maintaining more projects puts on a deployment stack carrying 150 different projects but which was architected to solve a single business goal 15 years ago. Imagine being a 67 yr old manager who just wants to be in the business of getting letters printed on tree pulp from Bumfuck, Idaho delivered to Louisville, Alabama reasonably effectively. Knowing nothing about computers or information technology, imagine the insane stack of perfect decisions that have to be made to get the IT infrastructure of a company like FedEX running. Not saying going to the cloud is the best decision. Not even saying it's the decision I would make. But it does sound very enticing to just have all of those problems go away by throwing a couple hundred million dollars a year at Google, Microsoft or Amazon (btw lol if they go with Oracle or IBM instead).

hotpotamus 4y ago
Article says they're going Azure and Oracle. I actually use Oracle myself, but only their free tier because it's very generous. It probably works as marketing because I'd be inclined to throw them in the mix if I was looking for a real provider.
dopylitty 4y ago
>You're also not going to be dealing with downtime because you couldn't find staff talented off to properly configure your Cisco networking equipment. >Your system administrators department is not gonna block any innovative employee initiatives because of the strain maintaining more projects puts on a deployment stack carrying 150 different projects but which was architected to solve a single business goal 15 years ago. As someone in the “cloud” team at a legacy enterprise I strongly disagree with both of these points. Cloud networking is as complicated as anything the Cisco people ever did but instead of CCNA you have certifications that barely scratch the surface of the complexity. So you get cloud people who barely understand the platform they’re administering flying by the seats of their pants. And instead of having a networking team to focus on networking the same people trying to figure out static routing across regions in AWS are also the people responsible for migrating EC2 instances from GP2 to GP3 but they were deployed with cloudformation which will replace the instance if your change of the disk type. So getting to the second point this team will be totally overwhelmed and likely inexperienced so good luck getting them to do anything to help your “innovative” project because right hope they’re too busy trying to figure out how EKS is using up all the IP addresses in us-west-2. Executives who think they’ll save on money by moving to the cloud are delusional. They’re also delusional if they think it’ll increase stability or resilience. And that’s not even getting into the EMR clusters the “data science” team spun up and left running at $30k/day.
- ramesh31 4y ago
  God so much this. I see entire teams of developers who are, theoretically, software engineers. Yet their entire day is just configuring AWS. Endless meetings with endless acronyms and endless complexity to solve problems that have been solved for 20 years, but instead of focusing on the metal and first principles, the entire architecture is lost in a sea of "cloud services" that require multiple certifications to even begin to understand. All of this in service of an application load that could easily be handled with a few big servers.
mbesto 4y ago
> There's not a company in the world that spends more than $1m annually on cloud costs that has saved money by doing so. You don't go to the cloud to save money, you go to the cloud to reduce technological risk. I don't know why I have to explain this every time "data center vs cloud" discussions come up, but if you reduce risks, then you are in effect saving money.
- tinco 4y ago
  There are other ways of reducing risks. You only save money if it's the most efficient way of reducing risks and your risks are purely convertible into cash. I'm quite sure if you take managing your IT infrastructure as seriously as you take your core business, you can definitely save tons of money by handrolling your infrastructure. There's also a big difference between doing so 10 years ago versus now, with all the enterprise grade open source solutions to infrastructure challenges.
  - mbesto 4y ago
    > I'm quite sure if you take managing your IT infrastructure as seriously as you take your core business Try telling a company like Catepillar who manufactures excavating tools to "take IT as seriously as you do making tools"? > with all the enterprise grade open source solutions to infrastructure challenges You mean like OpenStack? Have you ever been in a large IT org (non tech company...like a distributing/manufacturing company) that has tried to implement it? and then maintain it? Oof...
    - tinco 4y ago
      It seems you're trying to nail down an absolute, I'm just saying that there's options sometimes. In my opinion AirBnB is setting money on fire by running on AWS. They've got huge talent pools of great engineers they could activate to in house their infrastructure and they'd save hundreds of millions of dollars. At the same time there's companies that have no business running their own web applications let alone their own infrastructure. A company like caterpillar I think should be run almost entirely on no/low code platforms. Their research department might run some code, they might have teams doing embedded dev for their devices. Beyond that it should just all be SaaS. And between those two extremes there is like a whole spectrum a business could be on.
Rochus 4y ago
> you go to the cloud to reduce technological risk And exchange it with dependability risks > you're not getting strangled by any Oracle contracts Unless you go to the Oracle cloud > Your system administrators department is not gonna block any innovative employee initiatives They're still there, aren't they?

by tinco 4y ago

hotpotamus 4y ago

Article says they're going Azure and Oracle. I actually use Oracle myself, but only their free tier because it's very generous. It probably works as marketing because I'd be inclined to throw them in the mix if I was looking for a real provider.

dopylitty 4y ago

>You're also not going to be dealing with downtime because you couldn't find staff talented off to properly configure your Cisco networking equipment. >Your system administrators department is not gonna block any innovative employee initiatives because of the strain maintaining more projects puts on a deployment stack carrying 150 different projects but which was architected to solve a single business goal 15 years ago. As someone in the “cloud” team at a legacy enterprise I strongly disagree with both of these points. Cloud networking is as complicated as anything the Cisco people ever did but instead of CCNA you have certifications that barely scratch the surface of the complexity. So you get cloud people who barely understand the platform they’re administering flying by the seats of their pants. And instead of having a networking team to focus on networking the same people trying to figure out static routing across regions in AWS are also the people responsible for migrating EC2 instances from GP2 to GP3 but they were deployed with cloudformation which will replace the instance if your change of the disk type. So getting to the second point this team will be totally overwhelmed and likely inexperienced so good luck getting them to do anything to help your “innovative” project because right hope they’re too busy trying to figure out how EKS is using up all the IP addresses in us-west-2. Executives who think they’ll save on money by moving to the cloud are delusional. They’re also delusional if they think it’ll increase stability or resilience. And that’s not even getting into the EMR clusters the “data science” team spun up and left running at $30k/day.

ramesh31 4y ago
God so much this. I see entire teams of developers who are, theoretically, software engineers. Yet their entire day is just configuring AWS. Endless meetings with endless acronyms and endless complexity to solve problems that have been solved for 20 years, but instead of focusing on the metal and first principles, the entire architecture is lost in a sea of "cloud services" that require multiple certifications to even begin to understand. All of this in service of an application load that could easily be handled with a few big servers.

mbesto 4y ago

> There's not a company in the world that spends more than $1m annually on cloud costs that has saved money by doing so. You don't go to the cloud to save money, you go to the cloud to reduce technological risk. I don't know why I have to explain this every time "data center vs cloud" discussions come up, but if you reduce risks, then you are in effect saving money.

tinco 4y ago
There are other ways of reducing risks. You only save money if it's the most efficient way of reducing risks and your risks are purely convertible into cash. I'm quite sure if you take managing your IT infrastructure as seriously as you take your core business, you can definitely save tons of money by handrolling your infrastructure. There's also a big difference between doing so 10 years ago versus now, with all the enterprise grade open source solutions to infrastructure challenges.
- mbesto 4y ago
  > I'm quite sure if you take managing your IT infrastructure as seriously as you take your core business Try telling a company like Catepillar who manufactures excavating tools to "take IT as seriously as you do making tools"? > with all the enterprise grade open source solutions to infrastructure challenges You mean like OpenStack? Have you ever been in a large IT org (non tech company...like a distributing/manufacturing company) that has tried to implement it? and then maintain it? Oof...
  - tinco 4y ago
    It seems you're trying to nail down an absolute, I'm just saying that there's options sometimes. In my opinion AirBnB is setting money on fire by running on AWS. They've got huge talent pools of great engineers they could activate to in house their infrastructure and they'd save hundreds of millions of dollars. At the same time there's companies that have no business running their own web applications let alone their own infrastructure. A company like caterpillar I think should be run almost entirely on no/low code platforms. Their research department might run some code, they might have teams doing embedded dev for their devices. Beyond that it should just all be SaaS. And between those two extremes there is like a whole spectrum a business could be on.

Rochus 4y ago

> you go to the cloud to reduce technological risk And exchange it with dependability risks > you're not getting strangled by any Oracle contracts Unless you go to the Oracle cloud > Your system administrators department is not gonna block any innovative employee initiatives They're still there, aren't they?