How can you guarantee you'll have access to your 2TB Google Drive when they ban your Google account for breaching terms or accidentally tripping a circuit breaker across one of their offerings?
> the so-called "internal" IT team can and will do just the same.
but how is shadow IT gonna solve anything? it'll get kudos from the junior VP, chuckles from the SVP, but the CIO will laugh you out of the room at how poor you are at getting shit done internally.
> The problem isn't the cloud.
The problem is how gullible folks are at cloud advocacy, or any vendor advocacy in general. It's all lies but cloud lies are better than others! Your 3-year commitment won't scale down to low figures. Oh you wanna have that many nodes come black Friday? Gotta reserve! Yup, infinite scale actually means infinite lies.
Above all, the cloud is not cheap. 11B profit on 33B revenue per quarter at AWS. If your local IT spend is inefficient, I bet it won't be more efficient in the cloud.
> Did you know that cloud cost less than what the internal IT team at a company would charge you?
Yes. Internal IT teams ran old-school are inefficient. And that's what the vendor tells you while they create shadow IT inside your company. Skip ITSM and ITIL... do it the SRE way.
Until the cloud economist (real role) comes in and finds a way to extract more rent out of their customer base (like GCP's upcoming doubling rates on CDN Interconnect). And until internal IT kills shadow IT and regains management of cloud deployments. Cybersecurity and stuff...
Back to square one. ITIL with cloud deployments. Some use cases will be way cheaper... but for your 100s of PBs of enterprise data, that's another story. And data gravity will kill many initiatives just based on bit movement costs.
> Besides paperwork, the cost to you (for your cost center) would be more than using the company credit card for the cloud.
To some extent. One is hard dollars the other is funny money. But I thought paying for cloud with the company credit card was a 2016 thing. Now it's paid through your internal IT cost center, with internal IT markup.
I've seen petabytes of data move to the cloud and then we couldn't perform some queries on it anymore as that store wouldn't support it, and we'd need to spend 7 figures to move to another cloud database to query it. And that's hard dollars.
Yes, during early cloud days it was lean and aimed at startups. Now it's aimed at enterprise, and for some reason lots of startups still think it's optimized for them. It's not and it hasn't been for a long time.
The cloud is a psyop, a scam. Except at the tiniest free-tier / near free-tier use cases, or true scale to zero setups.
I've helped a startup with 2.5M revenue reduce their cloud spend from close to 2M/yr to below 1M/yr. They could have reached 250k/yr renting bare-metal servers. Probably 100k/yr in colos by spending 250k once on hardware. They had the staff to do it but the CEO was too scared.
Cloud evangelism (is it advocacy now?) messed up the minds of swaths of software engineers. Suddenly costs didn't matter and scaling was the answer to poor designs. Sizing your resource requirements became a lost art, and getting into reaction mode became law.
Welcome to "move fast and get out of business", all enabled by cloud architecture blogs that recommend tight integration with vendor lock-in mechanisms.
Use the cloud to move fast, but stick to cloud-agnostic tooling so that it doesn't suck you in forever.
I've seen how much cloud vendors are willing to spend to get business. That's when you realize just how massive their margins are.
Thanks. I unsubscribed when I busted my weekly limit in a few hours on the Max 20x plan when I had to use Opus over Sonnet. It really feels like they were off by an order of magnitude at some point when limits were introduced.
I've seen how the cloud changed over 20 years from s3/ec2 in 2006 to what we have today. I've also seen how it's built at AWS. It's ironic they call it utility computing.
What I always feared as a user was that they'd invent a new billable metric, which happened a few times. Have you ever seen a utility add them at this pace? The length of your monthly usage report shows all those items at $0 that could eventually be charged. Let that sink in.
Another interesting element is that all higher level services are built on core services such as s3/ec2. So the vendor lock in comes from all propaganda that cloud advocates have conditioned young developers with.
Notice how core utilities in many countries are state monopolies. If you want it to be a true utility, perhaps that's the solution to get them started. The state doesn't need a huge profit, but it needs sovereignty and keep foreign agents out of its DCs. Is it inefficient? Of course. But if all you really need is s3/ec2 and some networking / queuing constructs, perhaps private companies can own higher tier / lock-in services while guaranteeing it runs on such a utility. This would provide their users reduced egress fees from a true utility which doesn't need (and is not allowed to have) a 50x profit on that line item.
Right, but depending on your workload, compute might just be 1/3 to 1/2 of your spend. The remainder going on storage, networking (egress and internal between regions & AZs), LBs, and higher abstraction services (from queues to search to serverless).
Feels great to talk about 27-50% but turns out it's 9%-16% when all is said and done. You can get commitment savings on other services but you need higher spend.
Feels odd that big cloud gives better discounts to enterprise. They really don't cater to startups as much as they posture.
You have to remember that health status dashboards at most (all?) cloud providers require VP approval to switch status. This stuff is not your startup's automated status dashboard. It's politics, contracts, money.
Yup, pay more but get 2 providers.