back to article So lemme get this straight. UK.gov ministries are getting better value from AWS... by spending more on AWS?

The UK's Home Office has handed AWS a fresh four-year hosting contract worth up to £120m under the One Government Value Agreement, just weeks after the Department for Work and Pensions renewed its vows with the US cloud biz. The deal agreed with the Home Office replaces one that was inked with AWS in December last year valued …

  1. Alumoi Silver badge
    Coat

    Clearly!

    If you spend $100 and have a 10% return, that's $10.

    Now, if you spend $1.000.000 at the same 10% return, that's a whooping $100.000.

    See, more money invested, better value!

  2. Hiya

    So what....

    Guess that it's year end for AWS sales team. Rewrite deal to get commission before year end - and possibly moved off account. Same old, same old - just different year - so what

  3. martinusher Silver badge

    I wonder if anyone in uk.gov has heard of 'yield management'?

    Once an entity has market power they'll use it to get the best fiscal results. Just jacking up prices depresses demand so there's this delicate dance between seller and market that is designed to screw the customer for as much as the provider can get away with. Back in the good old days markets were open -- you'd go to buy spuds down the literal market and you'd see a number of stalls displaying them with prices so you could choose what to buy based on need and how much you want to pay. This sort of market is now a rarity -- the Internet allows us to track the habits, needs and worth of individual customers while keeping those customers from meaningfully sharing information.among themselves. The result is simple -- you're screwed.

    The UK government, like everyone else, is going to discover that cloud computing is really good value for money until they have fully committed to a cloud provider with no easy path back. At that point they're just a milch cow, one with the advantage of bottomless pockets.

    I may be a bit old school but I think that government is an outstanding example of an entity that needs to keep control of its own cloud, if for no other reason than its going to outlast any company and any technology. Clouds are for little people (and even then there might be some benefit to having a cooperative run it).

  4. Dr_Barnowl

    Better than the old way...

    Seriously - before going "Cloud", DWP hosting was from the stone age.

    You want a server? That's an actual server, real iron. You're paying through the nose for it, and probably waiting weeks for it to be approved and racked.

    I remember the week my line manager showed me our hosting costs spreadsheet for sign-off, being a "traditional" civil servant and not the most technical of things, bless him.

    I had it all turned off and moved to our cloud estate in less than a month. And saved more than 90% on our ongoing hosting costs right there, and more savings followed in the next month or so.

    For much of government, AWS means, for example, the difference between paying hundreds of pounds for having a dedicated Jenkins box sitting around doing bugger all most of the time, or paying a cent a minute for CodeBuild. Or saving hundreds for a pair of redundant web servers serving up a website you could reasonably host on a Raspberry Pi in the broom cupboard, if it wasn't for the fact that it had to be fault tolerant, etc. ; vs just shoving it in a CloudFront distribution, again, for pennies.

    Have the journalists and commenters ever considered that the reason that the government are going long on Cloud is because .. there are actually savings to be made?

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