Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

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> Their on-prem IT is more expensive than public cloud.

Not really. Most of those companies have lax Cloud Cost Management hygiene and/or the Cloud Platform team is separate from the Infra/Servers team.

If you are F250 you can probably negotiate a nice discount if you are able to fully migrate to a single cloud, but most companies don't want to keep all their eggs in a single basket. This means larger organizations cannot avail competitive discounts on public cloud.

By bundling Private Cloud (VMWare ESXi), Network Security (VMWare NSX), APM (CA Wiley), Endpoint Protection (Symantec Enterprise), and Data Security (Symantec Enterprise) I can purchase 5 critical pieces of Enterprise Infrastructure using a single PO. This is critical at large organizations as any PO above $30k almost always requires CFO or Comptroller approval, and a single PO to Broadcom satisfies your Infra, DevOps, and Security needs (which are all cost centers if you aren't a tech company).

Btw, Broadcom themselves is almost entirely on GCP [0]. Almost all their infra and products are served using a GCP stack on the backend.

[0] - https://www.broadcom.com/blog/broadcoms-transformation-journ...

I looked at VMware "in the cloud". It was around $50,000 - $100,000 per year for 48 cores. I've defended AWS pricing many times, mostly because of ability to burst etc. But the VMware workloads are often much flatter in terms of demand - ie, many systems just left running so the AWS value - while there of course, isn't as obvious to me.

"In the cloud" options are often much more expensive than what they should be due to customer expectations. The margins are much higher than in on-prem (where 80% "discounts" are common).

Sure. That said, the cost / benefit tradeoffs often seem pretty good for AWS. The cost is low enough to other costs on a project that gain on velocity is worth it. In others gains on reliability, maintenance savings etc.

Ended up doing a small on-prem solution. VMWare for 6 CPUs x 32 cores = 192 cores runs about $3K/year for the software side which is a good deal to get started. That leaves about $240K/year or so to cover other costs. Not a slam dunk necessarily, but the on-prem store with vmware is not unreasonable.

> the cost / benefit tradeoffs often seem pretty good for AWS

If it's greenfield I'd agree. There's a reason why most companies founded after 2008 have a heavy public cloud presence.

The issue is if you are a large brownfield deployment (like most F1000s), a "Cloud Transformation" takes forever and is costly.

It can be done - for example Capital One and Broadcom - but it requires executive buy-in to respect engineering leadership and build a solid DevOps/Platform team.

I know if I was to found my own company tomorrow, I'd be entire cloud first because of velocity and ease of scalability, but you can't expect a company like UnitedHealth Group to transition to an entirely cloud first environment within a 2-3 year timeframe as even a minor outage represents millions of dollars lost a minute and litigation.

Over the next 10-15 years we'll see a large number of non-tech first companies becoming multi-cloud, but in 2023, it's still work in progress.

Who do you work for BTW?

PE/VC in the Enterprise space now. I used to be a PM and SWE and a staffer for a hot second. Not at Broadcom but have worked closely with their team and alumni. The Enterprise Infra space is a small world.

Edit: Also, I didn't realize I'm replying to an actual legend in the systems/networking space. I read some of your papers when I was an undergrad and later as an early career SWE.

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