5 ms·

Oof, I'm twitching just reading that because we're in exactly the same boat. The problem with the ROI is that any kind of not-self-run cloud is guaranteed to b

Oof, I'm twitching just reading that because we're in exactly the same boat. The problem with the ROI is that any kind of not-self-run cloud is guaranteed to be more expensive in direct costs. This has been shown time and time again for any reasonably large enterprise. However, there is a long list of things that are hard to express in money that support a cloud move, mostly to do with keeping up with modern tech, hiring, DR, better resiliency, etc. and so the decision can be quite dependent on the particular execs in the chain of command and their subjective values.

sargun 3y ago
This is based on the assumption that Azure has modern tech, hires well, DR, and better resiliency than LinkedIn's "cloud" for LinkedIn's needs. There's a bit of a problem around incentives here, where Azure is built to sell to Azure's customer base, whereas LinkedIn has evolved their own stack over the years. The questions become: 1. Does it make sense to dump our special features in the stack, or move them to a higher level in the stack? 2. Does Azure have comparable capabilities for the LinkedIn stack? 3. Is LinkedIn worth it to Azure to sell to? --- Often times, "at scale", you can support custom solutions outside of cloud providers that are purpose-built, and often times more resilient and efficient than the cloud providers. AWS has taken a very interesting approach of building an incredibly wide set of solutions to support every customer under the sun, and their approach to being "customer obsessed" leads to them building super niche solutions if the deal is worth it. I'm not sure how Google and Azure handle these engagements.
- alphager 3y ago
  Google doesn't acknowledge that the customer exists or has wishes. Microsoft will allow you access to the PM of the product if you are big enough, but his answer will be a not-exactly-committing "in 3 years" because their roadmap is full.
  - vasco 3y ago
    Every once in a while Google acknowledges the customer exists, but usually for a brief moment, either to close their account, or to tell them they are using the product wrong. They promptly go back to work after such brief outings, so as to not fall into the mistake of actually listening.
- everforward 3y ago
  > 3. Is LinkedIn worth it to Azure to sell to? Microsoft owns both, so that question gets convoluted. It's not really about whether LinkedIn pays Azure enough to care.
ljm 3y ago
It's not really 'the cloud' as much as it's a managed mainframe you allocate resources from. Only it's actually quite expensive to allocate resources but it becomes more palatable with a monthly bill compared to setting up on-prem. Costs more money but easier on the cash flow.
kjellsbells 3y ago
Telco is a really good example of how hard it can be to move to the cloud no matter how hard you want to. I imagine financial services are similar. Telcos built their own clouds because there was no other way to get the primitives that they needed (classic case: a floating IP that could appear in data centers on different sides of the country and be ready to serve clients in the middle of a call in under 100ms without dropping the audio). I mean, cloud just was not built for that. The flip side is that it is freakishly expensive to keep doing that, and telco is not a business that is freakishly profitable. I'm watching efforts like Azure Operator Nexus (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/operator-nexus/overview https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/operator-nexus/overv...) which looks to be taking a stab at this, but even there, its more like OpenShift on specific hardware with some Azure dust, rather than a remaking of Azure primitives like redundancy for the telco universe.
- Sylamore 3y ago
  Microsoft purchased tech and people from AT&T to help boost Azure's telco capabilities as a cloud solution[0]. I haven't followed what's happened since it was spun out, but I know that Network Cloud was heavily OpenStack based so I'd would be interesting to see how that may have changed but I no longer work in the Telco space either. [0]: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/improving-the-cloud-for-telcos-updates-of-microsoft-s-acquisition-of-att-s-network-cloud/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/improving-the-cloud-f...
  - grepfru_it 3y ago
    Telco used to be all for openstack. They have all started the shift to containers and kubernetes
devjab 3y ago
A lot of organisations were already doing “cloud” before the big migrations to AWS and Azure started in the EU enterprise scene. Around the 2010 it became a much better business case to get into the local cloud, which is basically where we bought our own hardware and put it in rented rack space at local businesses which were specialised in running it, instead of having it in our own basements. This mostly didn’t scale beyond the national, or even regional, level but then that is still not a big issue for most organisations today. Then came the move to AWS and Azure, again because the business case made sense. A big part of this was Microsoft being good at selling their products in a bundle, so that getting into Azure sort of just made sense because of how well the IT-operations side benefitted from moving into things like Azure AD (now Entra ID for whatever reason), Azure Automation instead of scheduled tasks and so on. If your IT-operations infrastructure is already largely in Azure then your development will also be in Azure because it’s going to be such a tiny blip on your Azure bill that nobody will ever notice. With the price hikes, and also just how complicated it is to actually run and maintain IT-Operations in Azure (I can’t speak for AWS) we’re now in a world where more and more organisations here in Denmark are looking to get out of Azure/AWS to reduce cost, and many have already made the move. Of course no one is leaving Office365, so many of us are mostly just trying to broker better deals with Microsoft.
- Cupprum 3y ago
  I am curious, which companies in Denmark are trying to get out of cloud?
  - VadimPR 3y ago
    Basecamp/HEY is one publicly famous example.
    - mobilio 3y ago
      Another example is Ahrefs
- Hikikomori 3y ago
  Is colocation the cloud now?
otabdeveloper4 3y ago
> direct costs > vs ""modern tech"" FOMO Very tough decision, I'll need two MBA degrees to figure this out.
TuringNYC 3y ago
1000% Agree. So many ROI calculations I've seen in the past ignore key-person risks from internal systems, hiring premiums needed to keep specialized knowledge, and also carve-away infra human costs into other departments. Once you carve out enough stuff from the ROI, you can sway the ROI calculation heavily. The folks who are too senior arent sufficiently technical to understand. The folks who understand benefit from the key-person risk and premiums paid, and thus are disincentivized to challenge the ROI comparison.
- brightball 3y ago
  Key person risk should be understandable as redundancy to just about any exec…at least I would hope so.
- foobarian 3y ago
  > and also carve-away infra human costs into other departments That's another great point; with the on-prem system where we run our own massive k8s/vm/data lake cloud, every team just throws things at it willy nilly and even though we know how to calculate total operating cost it's very difficult to set up backpressure to individual orgs and their budgets so there is quite a bit of waste I feel. With something like AWS the billing system is very detailed and is easy to attach to teams upfront. I'm not sure if it's good or bad that things are more efficient due to teams being incentivized to pay attention, but I kinda like it.

sargun 3y ago

This is based on the assumption that Azure has modern tech, hires well, DR, and better resiliency than LinkedIn's "cloud" for LinkedIn's needs. There's a bit of a problem around incentives here, where Azure is built to sell to Azure's customer base, whereas LinkedIn has evolved their own stack over the years. The questions become: 1. Does it make sense to dump our special features in the stack, or move them to a higher level in the stack? 2. Does Azure have comparable capabilities for the LinkedIn stack? 3. Is LinkedIn worth it to Azure to sell to? --- Often times, "at scale", you can support custom solutions outside of cloud providers that are purpose-built, and often times more resilient and efficient than the cloud providers. AWS has taken a very interesting approach of building an incredibly wide set of solutions to support every customer under the sun, and their approach to being "customer obsessed" leads to them building super niche solutions if the deal is worth it. I'm not sure how Google and Azure handle these engagements.

alphager 3y ago
Google doesn't acknowledge that the customer exists or has wishes. Microsoft will allow you access to the PM of the product if you are big enough, but his answer will be a not-exactly-committing "in 3 years" because their roadmap is full.
- vasco 3y ago
  Every once in a while Google acknowledges the customer exists, but usually for a brief moment, either to close their account, or to tell them they are using the product wrong. They promptly go back to work after such brief outings, so as to not fall into the mistake of actually listening.
everforward 3y ago
> 3. Is LinkedIn worth it to Azure to sell to? Microsoft owns both, so that question gets convoluted. It's not really about whether LinkedIn pays Azure enough to care.

ljm 3y ago

It's not really 'the cloud' as much as it's a managed mainframe you allocate resources from. Only it's actually quite expensive to allocate resources but it becomes more palatable with a monthly bill compared to setting up on-prem. Costs more money but easier on the cash flow.

kjellsbells 3y ago

Telco is a really good example of how hard it can be to move to the cloud no matter how hard you want to. I imagine financial services are similar. Telcos built their own clouds because there was no other way to get the primitives that they needed (classic case: a floating IP that could appear in data centers on different sides of the country and be ready to serve clients in the middle of a call in under 100ms without dropping the audio). I mean, cloud just was not built for that. The flip side is that it is freakishly expensive to keep doing that, and telco is not a business that is freakishly profitable. I'm watching efforts like Azure Operator Nexus (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/operator-nexus/overview https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/operator-nexus/overv...) which looks to be taking a stab at this, but even there, its more like OpenShift on specific hardware with some Azure dust, rather than a remaking of Azure primitives like redundancy for the telco universe.

Sylamore 3y ago
Microsoft purchased tech and people from AT&T to help boost Azure's telco capabilities as a cloud solution[0]. I haven't followed what's happened since it was spun out, but I know that Network Cloud was heavily OpenStack based so I'd would be interesting to see how that may have changed but I no longer work in the Telco space either. [0]: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/improving-the-cloud-for-telcos-updates-of-microsoft-s-acquisition-of-att-s-network-cloud/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/improving-the-cloud-f...
- grepfru_it 3y ago
  Telco used to be all for openstack. They have all started the shift to containers and kubernetes

devjab 3y ago

A lot of organisations were already doing “cloud” before the big migrations to AWS and Azure started in the EU enterprise scene. Around the 2010 it became a much better business case to get into the local cloud, which is basically where we bought our own hardware and put it in rented rack space at local businesses which were specialised in running it, instead of having it in our own basements. This mostly didn’t scale beyond the national, or even regional, level but then that is still not a big issue for most organisations today. Then came the move to AWS and Azure, again because the business case made sense. A big part of this was Microsoft being good at selling their products in a bundle, so that getting into Azure sort of just made sense because of how well the IT-operations side benefitted from moving into things like Azure AD (now Entra ID for whatever reason), Azure Automation instead of scheduled tasks and so on. If your IT-operations infrastructure is already largely in Azure then your development will also be in Azure because it’s going to be such a tiny blip on your Azure bill that nobody will ever notice. With the price hikes, and also just how complicated it is to actually run and maintain IT-Operations in Azure (I can’t speak for AWS) we’re now in a world where more and more organisations here in Denmark are looking to get out of Azure/AWS to reduce cost, and many have already made the move. Of course no one is leaving Office365, so many of us are mostly just trying to broker better deals with Microsoft.

Cupprum 3y ago
I am curious, which companies in Denmark are trying to get out of cloud?
- VadimPR 3y ago
  Basecamp/HEY is one publicly famous example.
  - mobilio 3y ago
    Another example is Ahrefs
Hikikomori 3y ago
Is colocation the cloud now?

otabdeveloper4 3y ago

> direct costs > vs ""modern tech"" FOMO Very tough decision, I'll need two MBA degrees to figure this out.

TuringNYC 3y ago

1000% Agree. So many ROI calculations I've seen in the past ignore key-person risks from internal systems, hiring premiums needed to keep specialized knowledge, and also carve-away infra human costs into other departments. Once you carve out enough stuff from the ROI, you can sway the ROI calculation heavily. The folks who are too senior arent sufficiently technical to understand. The folks who understand benefit from the key-person risk and premiums paid, and thus are disincentivized to challenge the ROI comparison.

brightball 3y ago
Key person risk should be understandable as redundancy to just about any exec…at least I would hope so.
foobarian 3y ago
> and also carve-away infra human costs into other departments That's another great point; with the on-prem system where we run our own massive k8s/vm/data lake cloud, every team just throws things at it willy nilly and even though we know how to calculate total operating cost it's very difficult to set up backpressure to individual orgs and their budgets so there is quite a bit of waste I feel. With something like AWS the billing system is very detailed and is easy to attach to teams upfront. I'm not sure if it's good or bad that things are more efficient due to teams being incentivized to pay attention, but I kinda like it.