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81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending
- sgtnoodle 4y agoI have access to a button that I can trivially press, that a coworker recently told me generates a $50 AWS bill.
- systemvoltage 4y agoRecursive lambda function call?
- sgtnoodle 4y agoIt's actually pretty cool, and the evolution of a piece of software I barfed out about 5 years ago. It's a CI job that deterministically runs thousands of simulated flights of an autonomous airplane, across a wide variety of interesting scenarios.
- roughly 4y agoI’m having the same conversations with people but from the opposite side: I’d far, far prefer you click the $50 button than do anything at all in the real world, because anytime anyone at my work touches anything that isn’t a keyboard, it’s costing us a hell of a lot more than that.
- sgtnoodle 4y agoIndeed. The whole point of CI and simulation is to reduce significantly more expensive manual testing. A couple months ago, folk were grumbling about a non-deterministic failure in the main build CI plan, for the N'th time without attempting to do anything about it. So, I proceeded to queue up dozens of jobs at a time, every 15 minutes for several hours, until I had several failures worth of interesting logs. I also had the interest of several other software teams, wondering why the entire CI pipeline was clogged up. It turned out someone years ago had written a cron job that would asynchronously delete every file on the build server older than a week, every hour on the hour. At some point some build artifacts got added that came from a cached copy on a remote server rather than locally built, and their modification timestamps were preserved. Any jobs that happened to be running while on the hour would have those files mysteriously disappear without a trace. Oops!
- paranoidrobot 4y agoThere's various levels of foot-gun clicks that can generate AWS bills many orders of magnitude larger. Reserved Instances are a really quick and easy way to blow a few million with one click. Europe (Frankfurt), 3 year, all-upfront, Windows w/ SQL Enterprise, Dedicated Tenancy, u-12tb1.112xlarge instance at $5,926,378 up-front. The discounted $225/hour rate for it disappears into the background noise. (No, I'm not willing to test it to find out if it actually works) [1] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/reserved-instances/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/reserved-instances/pricin...
- aamoscodes 4y agoYou can increase it to $6,070,809.96 by not paying upfront, or an order of magnitude more by just buying it on-demand and not checking your bill for 3 years (not recommended).
- paranoidrobot 4y agoMy comment was more about the 1-click-major-spend aspect. You can always terminate a normal instance - refunding a RI purchase is going to require a lot more explanation and dealing with support/finance/lawyers.
- biggc 4y agoWow! I was trying to find those numbers and the highest I could get to was ~899k. Then I switched to the OS to Windows from Linux. That licensing fee is wild!
- eb0la 4y agoOS Licensing is crazy. Last month I was telling a customer that they should just change their Qlikview system to something else just to avoid paying 25% of their bill to Microsoft.
- fock 4y agofor that price, you probably can buy 3 equivalent machines, a consulting shop to setup redundancy (this thing isn't!), install a living cabin to your colo and have someone sitting there on watch 24/7... (should have read the licensing issue - still you can buy 2 and the consultant)
- Spooky23 4y agoLol. Finally, someone does math.
- toomuchtodo 4y agoEasier to justify the premium in the flush times, not so much in the lean times. CTO/CIO drives during booms, CFO during busts. Folks like Microsoft will continue to do well because of Azure AD uptake, M365, Teams, the ecosystem as a whole. Google should be worried. AWS is entrenched as the new Oracle, might not grow as fast, but they’re not going anywhere.
- jshen 4y agoHuh? What’s the math?
- speedgoose 4y agoSome cloud providers are more expensive for many customers that don’t need the infinite scalability but a set of well performing VMs with fast storage and network too. An iPad Pro is faster and cheaper than many cloud resources. I don’t advise to run production workloads on an iPad.
- jshen 4y agoIt costs more to self manage services than to use a managed cloud provider in most non trivial setups.
- w1nst0nsm1th 4y agohttps://techcrunch.com/2019/06/21/three-years-after-moving-off-aws-dropbox-infrastructure-continues-to-evolve/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAJi47PpyVqyJ8YEdwMC0nv3Zmt61GZMjXPBsJa1c3GTfT6VKj-HfDaVLj00qp6y-Nv0_KdPslaC0sa_8h7DSw3ivks8FPOp3h3hdVIdZyyf_fLDw8RC7epuFykccPA8lnnVV8dWpnRdYVPrGCbi_jyJGRcfv1OnHatTzIDOtGo9A https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/21/three-years-after-moving-o...
- bushbaba 4y ago
- intrasight 4y agoI'd think 100% of businesses would direct to reduce spend
- jshen 4y agoIt’s opportunity cost. Is it better for developer X to increase revenue by adding a feature or save money reducing a cost? It depends.
- rippercushions 4y agoIf you ask a company if you should reduce costs or increase revenue, they will tell you "yes".
- jshen 4y agoI’d like to have my cake and eat it too. If everything is a priority nothing is a priority.
- tarranoth 4y agoIt sort of reminds me of a video I watched some time ago where some guy explains how he was cutting costs, by instead of having a high memory server they used one with nvme SSD and cut on memory usage a bit (I believe they used it to host some redis instance). Was like 1700 dollar difference per month, although I couldn't help but think if the time spent on the project was actually worth the manhours paid to the guy for cutting those costs.
- baskethead 4y agoShort Amazon? This can't be good for their most profitable division
- jshen 4y agoI wouldn’t. As soon as a “savings measure” causes a critical outage they’ll be directed to spend to prevent another outage.
- systemvoltage 4y agoRelevant Economist piece on Cloud infra: https://www.economist.com/business/2021/07/03/do-the-costs-of-the-cloud-outweigh-the-benefits https://www.economist.com/business/2021/07/03/do-the-costs-o... Archive: https://archive.ph/jBg8z https://archive.ph/jBg8z
- dboreham 4y agoNot 80% or 82%.
- ryandrake 4y agoI wonder if companies are 1. actually seeing economic difficulty and responding by cutting costs, or 2. imagining/predicting a slowdown, responding to their imagined/predicted slowdown by cutting costs, thereby causing an actual slowdown.
- TulliusCicero 4y agoThis happens for recessions, and also inflation: "Shit, inflation is way up! We better raise prices/salaries stat!"
- YuriNiyazov 4y agoMedium sized VC funded companies are usually not profitable month to month, and have a runway - how many months till we run out of cash? Previously, having two years of runway was considered plenty since new rounds were raised every 18 months or so. The word around VCs is that there won’t be as much bubbly investment as there was in the last decade, so now a four year runway is a common target. So you cut costs till you get to a four year runway.
- dilyevsky 4y ago4y is insane for anything before round B (?). Might as well bootstrap at this point.
- YuriNiyazov 4y agoYea, but when I say "Medium-Sized" I definitely don't mean "before round (B)".
- dilyevsky 4y agodoh i missed the medium sized part %)
- pbowyer 4y agoThere's a third reason for companies outside the USA who buy cloud services in USD - the strengthening dollar/falling exchange rates means everything is more expensive so to keep the budget the same you have to cut usage.
- userbinator 4y agoMarketing 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.
- adrianN 4y agoRenting can be cheaper than owning if the person you rent from can leverage economies of scale that you can't dream to achieve.
- flakeoil 4y agoRenting is typically cheaper if you use the thing rarely. If you use it regularly it is typically cheaper to buy.
- pclmulqdq 4y agoNo. Forget the economies of scale, because they don't help you, as a buyer. What helps you is leverage. The economies of scale only get passed to the consumer if another provider is willing to pass the savings on, which only happens in commodity markets (like oil, wheat, etc.). Low-end server rentals are a competitive market. "Big 3" cloud is not: they use differentiated products and egress fees to lock you in to their oligopoly. They don't have to pass on their economies of scale to you. They don't pass on their economies of scale to you. They charge you slightly less than your cost to leave them, and that's it.
- lupire 4y agoDo you also grow your own food to avoid the overhead of paying farmer and grocer?
- seydor 4y agoPeople do cook instead of eating out . Analogies are not problem-solvers, and it's a false dichotomy because owning is not the only alternative to the cloud
- jrumbut 4y agoThe 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.
- ocdtrekkie 4y agoThe 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.
- jrumbut 4y agoI don't necessarily disagree. I've always felt that there was a lot to be said for not becoming dependent on the latest and greatest features of any specific cloud. If you're pushing the limits of some service you probably want to own it. But my real gripe is that this survey is being presented as doom and gloom when you could equally summarize the results as "about 60% of IT leaders directed to stay the course or beef up cloud spending"
- sofixa 4y ago> 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?
- deathanatos 4y agoHow 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 it made queries against it much faster.) Further, most higher ups seem to have a sense of "it won't be invented here", and so a lot of stuff ends up in vendor land; need more people then to pull those separate bills into one spot, and start attributing costs against the revenue they might help generate. I've also worked a fair number of places where people were cagey about telling eng how much they're spending where. If you want your IT dept. to cut costs, they have to know where the money is going. And then there's the yak shaving of it all: 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. Cool storage should be (price * amount stored) and the "how much are we storing" graph is not proportional to the cost graph. The only gotcha is an early delete penalty, and we are also pretty confident we're not hitting that. (We know what's being deleted when, and none of it should be subject to it.) But how does it take a over week to answer the question?
- jamesfinlayson 4y ago> 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? I don't get time for that - I've got access to Cloudability but no one has ever showed me how to use it.
- noduerme 4y agoI manage one midsized company's set of cloud resources that I'm pretty sure could be reduced by 40% in cost or more if they were willing to take a 3 year advanced reserve. The problem is I can't get a handle on how much their infrastructure will or won't need to scale in the next three years, since they themselves don't know. There's always some new deal around the corner that would require scaling up. On top of that, I'm not sure what we have now will even be sufficient for the existing size of the business a year from now, as much depends on new features in the pipeline and how they end up being used. The result is they end up overspending by probably $3k a year, but the upshot is the flexibility. As far as getting completely off the cloud, I migrated them away from dedicated boxes years ago and I don't miss dealing with maintaining those. The extra time for that alone was worth at least $3k a year. Even with a smaller dedicated data center, there are still issues with getting tickets responded to promptly. And there's way less in the way of failover unless you build it yourself.
- blinded 4y agoMy previous employer did this. Was crazy what we saved by optimizing. Come to find out “lift and shift” without making your app cloud ready is expensive. Also network io is expensive at scale. Not super fun work tbh.
- type-r 4y agoFWIW at my own workplace the focus on cloud spending and cutting that bill has gone through the roof. The incentivization has been so good that teams are now constantly trumpeting their cost-saving measures. I've even seen cases where systems are purposefully shipped without any optimizations in order to give room for the follow-up "we saved $500k/year on this" email.
- Andaith 4y agoNot us. Cloud ALL THE THINGS...
- Existenceblinks 4y agoIT decision making has been unwise or corrupt since Oracle / SAP thingy (or way before). 1) pseudo social proof (hype) 2) corrupt deal in big corps.
- aaronrobinson 4y agoClickbait
- silisili 4y agoI'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.
- burritosnob 4y agoI 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 leverage the latest & greatest tech stacks / toolsets with no justifiable business need. >50% will confidently state they have “optimized” their environment and in almost every case there is money being left on the table. We have only engaged with one customer that we couldn’t offer savings. They spend $30M+ per year on AWS and had a full time staff of 3 engineers solely focused on cost optimization. >50% of IT / Engineering leaders became incredibly defensive when presented with savings analysis which almost always included reduction in technical complexity of stack. We have since pivoted and marketing/engaging almost exclusively to CEO/CFO as first contact. >50% of companies had one of more cloud costing/monitoring tools in place that was not being leveraged, or worse, gamed to produce inaccurate reports.
- jiggawatts 4y agoI 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.
- oatmeal_croc 4y ago"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.
- eb0la 4y agoA lot of companies run vanila VMs 24/7. Switching providers is quite easy - just add some networking and a migration tool. The key here is just the DNS or the AD.
- usr1106 4y agoI'd guess that does not mean that 29% moved all of their services to the competition. They might just buy a tiny bit from the competition compared to earlier just buying everything from their (expensive) main provider for convenience.
- sofixa 4y agoMore 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.
- raffraffraff 4y agoIt may be easier, but still take a lot of work to migrate. Perhaps k8s + object store + LB is easier for the developer, who has a few AWS APIs to replace, but is otherwise not affected. But talk to the person who has to rewrite 5k+ lines of terraform, figure out users, roles & policies in a new IAM, aunderstands the differences between EKS and GKE (what's the Google equivalent for IRSA?). None of it is rocket science, but it's time consuming. And while Google can migrate data from external databases (including AWS Aurora) it's still a big squeaky-bum moment.
- solatic 4y agoCloud computing made financial control the new engineering. Unless your service is running at an astronomical scale, nobody cares that your refactor saved 50 MB of RAM. The cloud vendors don't care if your workload needs 128 MB RAM, 256 MB RAM, 8 GB RAM. They'll run anything. Just pay for it. The industry is in a weird spot right now where Finance doesn't understand Engineering well enough to provide proper direction on where Engineering spend is truly wasteful (versus necessarily large), and Engineering quite frankly doesn't care, as long as Finance keeps paying the bills. It's rare to find leadership that appreciates both the underlying financial concern as well as where best inside their tech stack the financial waste lies and how to tackle it and prevent it in the first place.
- strawhatguy 4y agoBut do they have to care? The right answer is to set an actual budget. Finance to engineering: you have $x to work with. Then engineering cares, and the needed talks/concern about resource usage can happen. Part of engineering is optimization, cost is one metric to optimize.
- squokko 4y agoYou need to understand the engineering to set a sensible budget. What should the concrete budget be for a new 50-story skyscraper in New York City? You'd need to know quite a bit about the specific building and the construction market to answer that question. You couldn't just be some MBA with a spreadsheet.
- phpisthebest 4y agoBut you are working backwards from how most people and businesses do budgeting Budgets are not about what things cost, it is about what you or the business can afford. For example, I do not need to know how much Steak is this week to know I have $100 for food.. If steak fits in the budget then great, if not I get chicken... or beans...
- 4y ago
- whatever1 4y agoWell that is the benefit of cloud services. When cash is tight you just shut them down. Had the businesses bought expensive servers and hired specialized personnel they would not be able to wind down that effectively.
- pyuser583 4y agoI’ve seen way too many companies with the attitude “don’t worry about cloud spending.” Being frugal with cloud resources forces you to consider your tech choices. That’s a good thing!
- eurasiantiger 4y agoBeing frugal with cloud resources can also put a dent on your velocity.
- BiteCode_dev 4y agoIncomming, the submarine articles telling you that bare metal is back and that it was cool to setup your monolith with vertical scaling all along.
- pid-1 4y agoAs much as I love shitting on AWS, at this point I would just retire if I ever need to interact with a server vendor again.
- POPOSYS 4y agoQuestion 1: is it possible to run AWS / Google cloud with a fixed pre-paid monthly rate? Like e.g. "give me the most webservers for 1000$ / Month plus a Database". Question 2: does exist some kind of optimization-per-usecase service for such a fixed cost scenario? E.g. "Optimize for Website" or "Optimize for Database" and you can download a Terraform file?
- kumarvvr 4y agoAWS has provisioned versions of many services, which cost less upfront, but are longer term contracts.
- jamesfinlayson 4y agoNot that I know of for either (at least for AWS). AWS lets you provision some service though (I think DynamoDB has three different ways to be provisioned now) but it's not per use-case, it's based on what you think your needs are.
- weberer 4y ago1. Yes, its called reserved pricing. You have to enter a 1 year contract. Here's an example for EC2, which is Amazon's VPS offering. I assume other companies have similar systems https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/reserved-instances/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/reserved-instances/pricin... 2. You can chose which type of machine you want to reserve as your servers. Some of them are optimized for memory (good for databases). Some for CPU, etc https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/
- Dave3of5 4y agoAll pricing in AWS is usage based and you'll find it's your usage that is variable. An example of this is s3 storage. You tend to find your storage cost will increase over time as you put more stuff into s3. S3 also charges per api call so you'd have to somehow fix that. You have egress fess also which you're not in control of so variable customers usage will net a variable cost. In terms of reserving compute power (a popular answer) you can also achieve fixed price with on demand if you don't auto scale. So reserving here doesn't remove that variability. Reserving just make it cheap if you have constant use. So you can reserve you DB server as it's always on and you'll save over on demand. Many of the small cloud providers offer much less variability for their services with things like fixed networking cost. I tend to use those as I want a fairly fixed bill. The only thing that's variable on my cloud bill is backup storage and GBP to EUR exchange rate. The backup fee's are < 5% of the total cost at the moment.
- godisdad 4y agoThe 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
- phamilton 4y agoAt 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.
- aetherane 4y agoDoesn't Yahoo have engineers in non-US timezones?
- marcinzm 4y agoOr testing an emergency fix if something breaks at 4am. Problem with these types of metric driven approaches is that it incentives explicitly not caring about second order effects or externalities. Good for the person getting the bonus but bad for the company as a whole.
- phamilton 4y agoWe had a particularly big staging environment for the small team we were. In fact we had 11 of them. This engineer, years earlier, had rolled out "bento box" environments where we could launch a full as many identical staging environments as we needed. I believe we did keep an official staging running, but the 11 bento environments were the ones that shut down at night.
- phamilton 4y agoThis was the staging for our specific team and we were all US based and on the west coast. I can guarantee you that they spent more than $50k/month on all staging environments.
- ChicagoDave 4y agoMeanwhile, AWS and partners can’t find enough engineers. 500 decision-makers isn’t tens of thousands of companies moving to the cloud. Worst poll ever.
- mch82 4y ago> multicloud usage is becoming increasingly unwieldy Is anyone having a good multicloud experience? Any advice to share about keeping workloads portable across clouds?
- BackBlast 4y agoHow to multi-cloud. * Start with your architecture, KISS is king. Monolith using as few pieces as you reasonably can. Do you really need two DBs? Do you really need a message queue? etc. Trim, cut, remove. Scaling is mostly accomplished by using larger/faster systems. * Only use the basic services universally available (VM, S3). You need your own provisioning and backup scripts and routines. * Use your own VPN, nebula has been good for me. Makes your multi cloud infrastructure look like a flat network internally. * Be very aware of egress costs and how your provider calculates them. Keep intra-cloud comms down. Don't do obviously bad things like host the DB at a different provider than the app server. You can also mix on-prem/colo with cloud fairly seamlessly if you've built up this way. Cloud makes sense for really small, and for quick changes. Own your hardware when it makes sense. Make the switch when the finances line up with no need to change any software.
- yrgulation 4y agoJust drop AWS for most use cases and you’ll be fine.
- dig1 4y agoThis is why I'm sticking with pure vps/dedi providers - they'll give you fixed monthly costs per instance, plus network transfer, which is usually free below some threshold (unlike the Big Three). If you know what you are doing, you can negotiate fixed price two/three years in advance and get a discount. There is an initial setup cost, but maintenance is usually cheap if you put things in place correctly, automate everything and put proper monitoring system (not the cloud version, of course).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- buro9 4y ago> "Directed to reduce" Cloud spending. That feels like it should be 100%. An engineer should be as aware of their $ costs as they are their CPU load, filesystem I/O, or memory usage. An engineer should know how many instances they scaled to, and when they're going to scale down. In fact, the $ cost should be calculable (to a reasonable indicative amount by napkin math - precision not necessary) according to the factors the engineer knows. Not being aware of the costs feels irresponsible on the part of the engineer. There was a time when we had finite capacity (a single server) and perhaps the engineer had to care less about the cost then (but perhaps they should've cared about utilisation by some measure even then)... but now we're in an age of your application being able to scale beyond reasonable bounds of your companies purse strings, a solid understanding of what your application costs is an essential and core skill. If this is not the game you wanted to play, stay on a VPS or VM. Anyone possessing a solid understanding will also be looking to reduce or halt their spending... hence, I am surprised the number in the headline is not higher, even ignoring the macro-economic picture.
- BlargMcLarg 4y agoThis also means engineers need to be given the means to do so. From my experience, most engineers are not given the very basics to change things, observe important metrics and metric changes, and take the time to formulate a strategy. In theory most places are running with slack. In practice they run under capacity, and engineers aren't going to worry about things out of their control.
- quickthrower2 4y agoThe good thing about spending $20k a month on cloud is they will happily take your money, and make it easy to do so, whereas spending the same on a dev means hiring them first which is a bit of a hassle.
- BlargMcLarg 4y agoBeyond ridiculous once you leave SV, by the way. Being difficult about dev salaries but no problem spending 1-10x that on cloud services because one CBA to give their devs time to research costs and metrics.. and then complain why there are so few specialists. The lack of introspection is palpable.
- kesor 4y agoThe original report is located here https://wanclouds.net/resources/reports/2022_Cloud_Cost_Optimization_Outlook.pdf https://wanclouds.net/resources/reports/2022_Cloud_Cost_Opti...
- ksimukka 4y agoNice. Maybe I can finally get my hands on some under-utilised compute resources.
- KronisLV 4y agoAs someone who occasionally has to deal with on-prem projects, I sometimes wish I could just use self-service and acquire VPSes as needed to solve the need for resources, as I can in my personal projects. Instead, I find myself being slowed down greatly: "Having a log shipping solution would be nice here, but I cannot set it up, because there's not enough RAM. Static code analysis? Not enough RAM. Another back end API instance for that new front end we're working as a replacement for the old one? Not enough RAM. Wanting to test how well scheduled processes run overnight with larger amounts of data? Too few CPU cores. Want more container images stored in your own Nexus instance? Not enough disk space. Want another database instance for CI or testing destructive migrations? Not enough of anything." Which is the problem that the cloud largely solves, at the expense of way much money spent than necessary. But hey, when you have to deal with red tape to get more resources on-prem, that's just a way of managing the overall process and manages risks that you might not care about in the moment when you "just want to get things done"; albeit that's not to share that you shouldn't care about them. So there are definitely problems with either approach (even cloud setups might have to go through someone and Jira/Redmine issues, as opposed to self-service), albeit at the end of the day most of those feel social/economical - after all, those large corps need their cloud service profit margins.
- skywhopper 4y agoThis headline is contradicted by their data. 42% were told to “reduce” spending. No one reported being told to “halt” cloud spending.
- addicted 4y agoOne of the most incredible tricks the IT industry pulled was convincing companies to convert a whole bunch of capex to opex in the middle of a decade of historically low borrowing rates.
- mensetmanusman 4y agoSomeone post the story about how an interview candidate accidentally spent over $20,000 on a cloud compute quiz.
- PeterStuer 4y agoWhat is the % of IT teams directed to reduce overall spending? If that is more than 81% then cloud is even impacted relatively less than average during the current contraction.
- accountofme 4y agoDid anyone else notice their graph adds up to 101%? Edit: spelling
- marcosdumay 4y agoThat's absolutely normal. It happens because of rounding.
- perrygeo 4y agoAn edict to reduce cloud spending can have perverse consequences in the hands of stakeholders that don't understand the technical requirements of the business. One of the primary reasons for using cloud resources is scalability - the ability to increase your workload when there is work to be done, without up-front capital costs. Having a cap on absolute cost while the business expects jaw-dropping growth in the work outputs defies the laws of physics. These companies need to think in terms of improved cost efficiency and reduced waste _relative_ to the system throughput. If you incentivize your employees to reduce absolute cost absolutely, you'll lower throughput and build a culture where scaling up is a fearful event. Scaling up should be seen as a triumph - more work = more revenue - unless your business model is a total failure.
- dgudkov 4y agoIt wasn't that bad in the old days - fixed price per hardware, fixed price per software, and fully unlimited use of both with no risk of unexpected costs.
- mawadev 4y agoI saw 3 containers with about 4 crud apis per container produce $200-400 bills every month, where they all talked to the same single dynamo and s3 bucket... For about 4-5 users... You can't imagine the effort of configuring around and keeping up with the latest updates. Saddest part is the frontend had so much glue code, it was not fun to look at.
- telcal 4y agoAs a sample size of 1, I can say we've not been directed to reduce or halt cloud spending, but maybe we're just good at optimizing and always considering cost before creating new apps/services.