Cloud slowdown hits Amazon as orgs look to rein in cost Fears over stalling cloud services growth have hit Amazon’s share price, despite the company beating Wall Street estimates in its latest results. Microsoft and Google likewise showed better than expected cloud profit and loss accounts, perhaps indicating that such concerns are misplaced. However, readers who spoke to The Reg …
"However, anyone considering a similar move should think carefully, as many of the same forces driving up cloud prices are also making colocation costs and operating your own datacenter more expensive as well."
Prove it. Show us an itemized list of costs for any area. I think most people are too lazy to make such a list so they choose "cloud".
Here, here. Our colo has passed on double digit power increases in the last year, but it doesn't change the reality that we save oodles of money running our own environments vs public cloud.
I recently got a quote from our used hardware reseller, and the same server we bought last year is about 50% less costly this year. The gap just keeps getting wider.
Anyone's itemized list will definitely lead to arguments. Anything that shows high costs of on prem will be derided by anti-cloud people as incompetent, whereas any pro-cloud person will argue that an expensive cloud bill is due to inefficient choices of which services are used to accomplish the goal. There's no winning, because in most cases I've seen they'll both be right. You can do both of them incredibly badly, and there are places who do.
In general, whenever I see someone saying that cloud is always better or always worse, I expect the person to be biased and unfamiliar with one, if not both, of the choices. There are some cases where there is a clear distinction, and many others where the difference will be determined by particular choices of how to implement the desired setup. I'm afraid I've seen too many uninformed people* with very strong opinions that rely on an incorrect or inexact assumption.
* Not that I'm particularly well-informed either, but I at least hope to be more careful about stating things with certainty if I haven't got the experience or rough calculations that defend it.
Cloud IS demonstrably more expensive, but the accountants love it because of the metered billing.
And, as we all know, anything accountants love is an instant hit. It's the reason your hamburgers are made of cardboard and wafer thin. Why your cereal boxes are 2/3 the size they used to be and twice the cost.
Cloud is good for Microshaft and screw the on-prem crowd. It's all well and good until the Cloud vaporizes, and one day it will. After a few weeks of downtime, people will learn the true costs of the Cloud.
Cloud IS demonstrably more expensive, but the accountants love it because of the metered billing.
Not sure that's true, but then I'm not an accountant. But having spoken with some, metered billing has put them off the cloud because the bills can be unpredictable. At least with on-prem or collo, they have relatively fixed costs, and assets/tin they can depreciate.
We've had a bunch of stuff lifted-and-shifted from on-prem to cloud and that can be expensive because the economics are different: once I buy a server it's a sunk cost and using all its CPU isn't an issue.
Our designed-for-cloud services tend to be smaller, serverless and, while we have more of them, the cost per unit is tiny. We're taking a lift-and-shift application on later this year and we believe that we can reduce its cloud costs by 90% by using the "right" set of services, rather than just hosting the thing on a big ol' EC2 instance.
The other big saving is time. I used to wait for months for hardware to become available. I had to wait a year for our production Oracle server to be installed and configured for us. I can spin up a new series of cloud services in seconds.
From my professional and customer experience: lots of database queries are sub-optimal and hugely wasteful. Often orders of magnitude slower by such simple things as wrong statement order.
Add to those legacy queries the result of which nobody uses anymore.
Jesus... I've had DBAs fight me SO hard against putting in a necessary index. "IT'LL MAKE THE UPDATES SLOWER"
Yeah. We do updates 0.3% of the day. Look, this query gets executed over 5K/day and it goes from 1.1sec to 0.19sec. Give me my damned index!
Have a look at CQRS, eventual consistency, DDD, event-driven architecture, and then event sourcing as the cherry on the top.
There are many alternatives to synchronous operations directly from client applications through application/service layer to persistence layer and all the way back.
But first I'd recommend you friend up with the DBAs and agree on data as a guidance and have them bring some usage pattern data to enable constructive discussions.
Moving to the cloud is not for every Company/Organization. That is a decision you have to make. Will it save you money now, will it reduce cost long term?
Once you make that decision you have to manage costs! If you are not using a cloud auditing system you are setting yourself up for a painful bill one day! We use CloudChecker and it has resulted in finding unknown expenditure we were not aware of.
For example:
A project setup by a vendor had multiple AWS Backup jobs backing up the same resources twice. These jobs had no life cycle to archive or remove old snapshots.
S3 buckets with no life cycle policies, years of data sitting in Standard storage.
Vastly under utilized EC2 instances.
Lastly, if you allow your staff to have unfettered access to services like EC2 or S3 they will create things that eventually cost you money that you are unaware of that will increase your bill.
All true enough. But your advice is counter to what the cloud providers say and peddle in their marketing, and what many end-users say they like about cloud.
I.e. the ability to quickly fire up cloud instances and services, without having to wait for their company IT group to provision things, just click-click-click a whole new cloud datacenter into existence ... and a whole new set of cloud bills.
Shocking that the cloud providers promote that kind of mindset and behavior, eh?
Turns out, running an IT estate and infrastructure well isn't easy, it's potentially costly, whether cloudy or on-prem. You need skilled, experienced hands on the wheel either way.
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