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Comment by jlg23 | Hacker News Reader

Pretty sure a typo and the million wanted to be a kilo?

$120m/year for apparently unnecessary IT capacity would be hard to hide even in government contracts...

I’ve seen a big bank spin up a dev environment in a cloud for a lending platform at a cost north of $36M a year before they finished the requirements for the project.

Not impossible at all to believe they could cut $10M/month from could spend at a big enough company just by trying.

Its AWS. Isn't "obscure high costs" the name of the game? But now people have the time and incentive to dig into those costs more critically.

I guess the question is why would you wait to make savings like that? $10m/month would pay for a small 'cloud cost cutting' team with plenty of change left over.

$120m is not ridiculous for a medium to large enterprise.

For an engineering team of ~1000, just the build servers will cost about $1-5m a month (depending on what's being done there).

$1000+/month/per engineer sounds way too high.

seriously, that's a very beefy server per engineer, just in cloud resources. not including what they use to do their day to day work. NFW would I allocate such a spends per engineer--maybe for beefy projects/groups, but not for the org as a whole.

It’s not just costs incurred by engineers, it’s costs incurred by users. If you’re providing file storage as part of your app, then for every engineer with a dev environment in the cloud, 1000 users could be uploading gigabyte files into your S3 bucket.

Depends on how many engineers you have.

I work for a company with ~1000 engineers, and our build server spend is much lower than what you suggest. If we were spending even $10k/mo on build servers, heads would roll.

$1M/mo will rent you about 300 c5d.24xlarge servers, at on-demand rates (and of course no medium or large enterprise is paying the higher on-demand rates). I'm pretty sure we're running somewhere on the order of 10 build servers, and they're maybe 4xlarge or 8xlarge boxes.

That seems... excessive.

Let's say we pair engineers up just to make my math a little easier here. One engineer's allotment goes to compute resources, another goes to storage.

At the low end, that's a 32 core/128GB RAM build server with 10TB of storage per pair.

At the high end, depending which way you spec that out, that's 96 core/385GB RAM with 50TB per pair.

What the hell are you guys building?!

I know of a few companies burning AWS at around that rate, though they are outliers. And yes, 90+% of that is lighting money on fire. In the list of business priorities, cost containment is pretty low for some companies when capital is cheap. There is a much larger cohort of companies spending much less but wasting just as much.

I once saw a major west coast health insurer purchase $50MM+ in hardware to solve what could have been at most a couple million software problem. In fact, had they negotiated well they might have been able to pawn the whole problem off on their vendor.

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