Bank of America's CEO says it's saved $2B per year by building its own cloud - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/bank-of-americas-350-million-internal-cloud-bet-striking-payoff-2019-10 <comment><USER2> I think a strong argument can be made either way.

There's definitely financial savings to be had by doing it in-house (either literally or utilizing existing data centers as here). But what I've experienced is that companies are often attracted to Big Cloud™ not just for financial reasons but to flatten/simplify their corporate reporting structure. It is the ultimate delegation.

This isn't simply about having fewer staff (although that can reduce internal politics and inefficiencies), but making fewer decisions and more importantly reducing the potential for making the wrong decisions (which can be career- costly, regardless of right decisions made previously).

These "soft" costs/savings are rarely discussed because they cannot be measured, unlike a balance sheet. But there's definitely a whole other dimension to infrastructure outsourcing that is worthy of note.

In this case BoA are saving money but in exchange retain additional layers of staffing, that require oversight, and ultimately decision makers willing to take risks.

<comment><USER3> > This isn't simply about having fewer staff (although that can reduce > internal politics and inefficiencies), but making fewer decisions and more > importantly reducing the potential for making the wrong decisions

This is a myth directly from cloud providers marketing campaigns: that using the cloud simplifies infrastructure to the point that you don't need as much and/or as qualified staff.

In reality it is quite the trap: without experienced system administrators AWS and the like are free to dig their hands deeper and deeper into the pockets of their unsuspecting customers.

<comment><USER4> Yeah but you don't need data center engineers, real estate specialists. Power specialists. Etc.

<comment><USER5> You can rent dedicated server or onprem ? people always go from cloud to building your own cpu in these threads, never in the middle

<comment><USER6> Yeah we literally turned our $7k a month AWS bill into $1k a month by changing to 3 dedicated servers (Fully managed!) and cloudflare. It's better in every conceivable way.

<comment><USER7> For anyone doing this... look around.

Tooling has only improved.

We were able to cram a large set of applications into a group of instances using CapRover.

Instead of 2-3 instances, and a whole bunch of RDS, we ended just recreating the databases there along with minio for storage (we write a small amount of data to S3 storage).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I used to work at a very large financial publishing company.

I joined just at the point where they were moving from VMware to AWS.

It was never a cost saving exercise. It was a way to completely change the culture of the IT department. As they were one of the very first news websites, they had at the time ~18 years of cruft to deal with.

The drive to the cloud was about flexibility, and if we are honest, shaking the staffing tree to get rid of the ossified staff.

They went from three data centres (mixture of SUN and Intel blades all backed by FC) to pure AWS/heroku. The running costs went up significantly, the opex was close to £3mil in AWS bills alone, all to put text on a web page.

It will continue to rise because it offers flexibility, and as each product now has its own account, standards are difficult to enforce. This means lots of snowflake installs of X that are now critical to Y.

The cloud is more expensive for large companies, for most workloads. For SMEs its the total opposite.

<comment><USER9> > It will continue to rise because it offers flexibility ... The cloud is more > expensive for large companies, for most workloads.

The way I read this is that the operating costs are higher in the cloud, but presumably dwarfed by recouped opportunity costs. This makes sense to me, given my limited experience working in large companies where every interaction with IT involved a 2-6 week turnaround time. Need a VM? Fill out a bunch of paperwork and then wait a month. We missed a lot of opportunities that way.

<comment><USER10> A private cloud can fix that turnaround time just as easily.

The true opportunity cost in large corporations is from, IMHO, been the general attitude of "we can't do foo new thing because that's [not best practice, not (barely) supported by some other large corporation, too cheap, too big of a change, etc]."

The ability to create extremely flexible workloads in minutes means nothing when security has to approve sneezes and containers are only something you'd find in a fridge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks like $2B of savings are from reducing the number of servers (200,000 servers earlier to 70,000 now). That has nothing to do with the advantages of a private cloud over public, etc. They were just over-deployed and by reducing the number of servers they would have enjoyed similar savings no matter where they were running them.

In fact they could have saved even more, and earlier, if they had already been in the public cloud, where you can just spin down the VMs and stop paying for them. In your own data center, a server is already sunk cost that you cannot entirely eliminate just by shutting it down.

<comment><USER12> Is $15,000 per server normal?

<comment><USER13> Yes.

"Server" implies redundant power supplies, 4-?? disks, an excess of high quality capacitors, a heavy steel case, a motherboard probably 4x the area of a typical ATX motherboard, ECC RAM, far more RAM slot capacity, etc.

Furthermore, extended service contacts are the norm. Five year same day on site service isn't unusual. Five year 24/7 on call/next day replacement is typical. One year warehouse service is unheard of.

That's just the device itself. Servers also imply a rack to put them in, real estate for said racks, 24/7 HVAC for said real estate set to substantially below room temperature, and an expectation to run it (and consume electricity) continuously. You also need network architecture to support them.

This isn't even getting into the realm of stupid specced servers. 512GB RAM? Easy. 128 cores? Sure. Disk space, network capacity are cost limited: if your server is limited by network speed or disk capacity you can simply punt a briefcase full of money at your supplier and get more. You want all of that arbitrary capacity disk space to be SSD that's just an accounting problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm not really sure why this should be a surprise. Just as big companies use a mixture of owned and rented real estate for various reasons, the same is true of other large expenses. If you have a large, predictable, core workload it makes sense to bring it in house, and use the elastic (rented) resources for unpredictable stuff (e.g. new efforts).

It's not like Amazon doesn't know this too (e.g. they try to make the transition harder by offering lots of proprietary services that help you ramp up faster, but can't be used elsewhere)

<comment><USER15> Agreed - past a certain (probably fairly massive) threshold of predictable long term load, it seems clear renting resources is going to be more expensive than the all-in cost of owning and operating your own.

Were the opposite true, you'd wonder about the economics of the cloud business model.

I think a more interesting way to look at this is, are the other advantages of cloud services (e.g. lots more flexibility and bundled proprietary technologies that you can't economically build yourself) actually worth the extra money?

Yes, by not using a cloud service you might save $2B a year, but does that cost you the opportunity to make even more than that, given you're probably moving slower or at least less efficiently than you otherwise could?

<comment><USER16> > but does that cost you the opportunity to make even more than that, given > you're probably moving slower or at least less efficiently than you > otherwise could?

The potential opportunity of fast-moving cloud features needs to be weighed against the opportunity costs of slow-moving cloud features. Where bespoke solutions can immediately provide tailored performance and maximize technical capabilities, a missing feature in any of your cloud providers services can be a showstopper or unmitigatable roadblock. And while lots of the technology is past the bounds of reasonable economical replacement, some of the technologies being shared through the cloud are nigh unfathomable to recreate.

Which is to say that the black ju-ju behind Windows update probably takes making a new MS to build up to present maturity, and unless you're a certified "big boy" letting small teams somewhere else fully dictate what you can and can't do at service boundaries probably impacts you in the long run.

Based on that, and IMO/IME: the answer isn't a binary choice but a constantly shifting point on a spectrum between the two, where on-premise/local-cloud and remote-cloud services are aware of one another and maximize capabilities while minimizing costs. Hybrid installations are just stronger, and are easier to reshape according to costs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I used to work at Bank of America as a level 2 app analyst back when they first started building Quartz. At the time, it was advertised internally as a system to be used for reporting, and so it had lots of built-in functionality to connect to databases, etc. Pretty neat.

That said.

The method of encoding _production_ database credentials was _rot-13_. No joke. In the Quartz interface, you could double click on a starred-out set of credentials, and it would run rot-13 on it and display the password. This was for FX, rates, credit card, mortgage, etc etc etc. Having access to this cloud system gave effective access into _all_ of Bank of America and Merrill Lynch.

They probably save a lot of their money by using very, very bad practices.

Still only the second worst security fail I've seen.

<comment><USER18> Could you share the winner?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I work for banks, and I can tell you that when you are doing devops with their "own cloud", you are miles away from a real cloud experience : no os choice, no hardware choice, slow provisioning, no access to repo, low and inconstant virtual disk (EBS) speed... I guess that you get what your paied for, and maybe the 2B saved on cloud are spend on IT service that suffer from such a poor own cloud experience. If they have 50 000 IT employees payed 100k, that's 5b a year. Including professional services and you are maybe at 10b. Just increase the productivity of this 10b by 20% and the money "saved" is not such a good deal...

<comment><USER20> 50,000 engineers just to run a bank? I don't think so.

<comment><USER21> 250,000 engineers at JPMorgan.

<comment><USER22> There are ~250k employees at JP Morgan, not engineers.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPMorgan_Chase](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPMorgan_Chase)

<comment><USER23> s/employee/engineer/2

(Note the 2.)

<comment><USER24> What tool is this for? Sed?

I've copy pasted it before, but i think you just made the syntax click

<comment><USER25> Yep, sed supports that syntax (substitute). echo 'There are ~250k employees at JP Morgan, not employees.' | sed 's/employees/engineers/2'

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Many large companies save money by having their own cloud, but those clouds sometimes really suck compared to AWS.

I know of one very large company where any request for a change in their cloud infrastructure always required a minimum two week advanced notice. In AWS such a change is just a mouse click away, and could be done in seconds.

AWS also has a really amazing integration of a large variety of services which is really hard for in-house clouds to match. I wonder how many AWS services the BoA cloud has, and how their own integration of those services matches that of AWS.

<comment><USER27> That's not a comparison of external cloud vs. self hosted though. It is a comparison of different operating models with respect to change control. Either one can exist in both external vs. self-hosted infrastructure.

I've been in places where the engineering team plugs in an old PC under a desk somewhere, gives it a public IP address of there's the production server. That's the self-hosted equivalent of the engineering team having full AWS access and any change is a mouse click away.

I've also experienced places where any change does take a week or two of approvals even though it is hosted on public cloud.

There is a time and place for all approaches. What works best with a three person startup putting up a MVP is quite different from what is best in a very large corporation operating in a regulated environment.

<comment><USER28> Change control and service delivery time-frames are two different things. When I left BOA in 2017, you could get most production changes implemented with only two days of lead time from a formal change control perspective. But, requesting a new Virtual IP on a load-balancer could easily take two weeks, just for every layer of bureaucracy to wet its beak. And it was impossible to request something so basic without an online service request, and then follow- up emails because the standard service offerings left all kinds of details undetermined and no structured way to provide the information.

<comment><USER29> Most production changes require a second set of eyes, sometimes from a particular team, but it's all "just" code review. You put your change in the team's queue, their oncall engineer reviews it the same day, you land the change and it gets executed automatically. Most have implemented namespacing so that changes that only affect your own team's stuff can be approved within your team.

This is all on owned hardware. The difference is that we're a SWE driven company (corporate IT is off in its own world, run in the more traditional way, but they don't touch engineering's production datacenters). Infrastructure teams provide APIs, not JIRA forms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> [https://web.archive.org/web/20191021160628/https://www.busin...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191021160628/https://www.businessinsider.com/bank- of-americas-350-million-internal-cloud-bet-striking-payoff-2019-10)

<comment><USER31> Hey cool trick thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The appeal of the cloud is less IT politics which in big company is a serious problem. Business Units can sidestep IT and go "self service" and spare a lot of pain and time in dealing with IT. I don't think any serious manager going into the cloud is doing it for the savings. But of course this is a bank and technology is their future so it makes sense that they want to keep a tight loop on the cloud activities.

</comment><comment><USER33> I used to work for BofA as a quant in their Charlotte HQ. Their cloud decision is the least surprising. You really have to see it from their pov. My boss used to say - "Charlotte is a 2-horse town. You either work for Bank of America, or you walk across the street to Wells Fargo"! Compared to these 2, the other companies are much smaller along most axes (market cap,employee count, or just sheer heft). There's an uptown walkway( like a private overhead glass tunnel) that safely escort bank workers from downtown to bank without coming into contact with riffraff :) Its just a whole new level of planned design. Imagine if all the FAANGs had an interconnected private glass tunnel walkway that looked down upon the unfortunate denizens of MV/PA/SF,while the chosen ones swiftly segwayed from FAANG to FAANG whilst checking in their latest git commit into kubernetes or whatever it is you guys do :) That's what it was like. Quite unreal.

But all this clout leads to a rather head in sand mindset on most strategic items, like technology choice, programming language choice, cloud choice (or non-choice in this case), version control choice etc. Everything was done in- house, in the most boring safest way possible tech ( mostly Java about 3 versions behind, some strange python lib where any function call was automatically logged!, and Excel & Matlab all over the quant land. I mostly sftp-ed financial data from some Quartz cloud...felt very quaint to do these sort of things in 201X. All laptops were locked down windows dell boxes on which you couldn't install anything, & ran some strange norton antivirus which hogged all the memory. My interview itself was so old fashioned. I thought since it was a Quant job, I'd get questions on math & finance. They trotted out their "chief developer" who wanted to know how to model a chair with 4 legs using Java OO. You know the 1990s Grady Booch garbage full of UML, with parent Table class & child Table & Leg Class & friend function & all that jazz. I was like Jesus this regressive inheritance based OO shit is still alive! Its a deeply old fashioned slow moving place. Very large IT budget with pretty much half of Charlotte working in some capacity for the bank. So yeah, if you had all the personnel & all the money, why wouldn't you build your own cloud. You are paying for all these people anyway, might as well give them something to do. Of all the employers I've worked for in my lifetime, this was the one place where I was personally asked NOT to work so hard, because I stayed at my desk after 5:30 pm.

(Sorry I have a regular 4 digit HN account but the bank doesn't like it if you talk about them. One of their lawyers once tracked me down because I mentioned some harmless datapoint about a technical problem I had worked on.)

<comment><USER34> > One of their lawyers once tracked me down because I mentioned some harmless > datapoint about a technical problem I had worked on.

Ok so now you said that won't it be pretty trivial to identify you again? How many "4 digit HN" users have they really tracked down before .. 1?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> You're also neglecting TTM as a consideration. As an example, I'm stuck having to wait 6 weeks to get new hardware provisioned into an available slot in one of my data centers to spin up a new Hadoop cluster, something my team could probably do in a couple of hours in the cloud.

That being said, we control the HW and SW stacks end to end so I don't have to worry as much about the nightmare scenarios the NordVPN folks went public about today. Critical given we're in fintech ...

<comment><USER36> Friend of mine at a payroll processor you've all heard of was excited to migrate to AWS because it took 4-6 weeks for IT to provision a new VM. On their app team's dedicated hardware!

So much of the Fortune 500 lust for public cloud seems to come down to working around inefficient IT procurement and provisioning processes. They haven't automated, they don't maintain enough excess capacity, they haven't managed vendor relationships to assure fast order turn-around, financial controls are too onerous, etc.

Everything's virtualized but otherwise they're still operating like it's 1995.

</comment></comment><comment> bloody-crow > The bank, which has a $10 billion annual tech budget

Am I the only one completely befuddled by this number? What the fuck are they doing with these money and 200k servers? These are facebook numbers. For a bank. What?

<comment><USER37> I'm not sure why you find this surprising, a bank has a much more complicated problem space than Facebook.

\- They have a reasonably similar number of users (a fraction, but a large one).

\- Mistakes cost a lot, so they have to be a lot more careful. It's a lot easier to make money hacking a bank than hacking facebook.

\- They have to comply with all sorts of regulations.

\- They probably don't trust their own employees to not be trying to commit fraud.

\- They have to parse data on a scale that is likely similar or greater than facebook's. To detect fraud/lost credit cards/.... To decide who to give loans to. To price insurance. To decide how to trade stocks. ...

\- They have to run a physical fleet of devices in the field, outside of their control, that have to give people the right amount of money ~100% of the time.

At a glance I see that Facebook has something like 300 petabytes of data [0]. I've worked at a bank, my team had something more like 10, but I don't think much of it was things like video that are just naturally huge. BOA is also approximately an order of magnitude bigger than the bank I was at.

One rumor I heard while there was that there had been a bug in one of our mobile apps that had been costing us a million dollars a day in server time.

[0] [https://www.brandwatch.com/blog/facebook- statistics/](https://www.brandwatch.com/blog/facebook-statistics/)

<comment><USER38> How do you spend that much on software and have such an abysmal usability and security story? I don't _think_ there is anything technically difficult about the consumer software they offer, namely [https://www.bankofamerica.com/](https://www.bankofamerica.com/).

<comment><USER37> I think you would find that their security is better than you think. Otherwise they'd be hemorrhaging money left right and center to North Korea and the likes.

As for usability, probably a degree of incompetence, mixed with design-by- committee and legacy. Edit: It's worth pointing out that banks usually don't gain or lose customers based on their UX, so it's not something that the business optimizes much.

I don't think there is anything technically difficult about almost any of the consumer software facebook offers, except scale. The same applies here but exchange "scale" for "scale, reliability, security, and regulatory compliance".

<comment><USER38> > I think you would find that their security is better than you think.

You can get in to my account by verbally relaying my grandfather's first name over the phone. You can open a bank account with a SSN and no photo id. What security? Their "security" is a fraud department, much like our credit card industry.

> Otherwise they'd be hemorrhaging money left right and center to North Korea > and the likes.

This is not how transactions work.

> Edit: It's worth pointing out that banks usually don't gain or lose > customers based on their UX, so it's not something that the business > optimizes much.

All banks offer the same shitty experience. What does differentiate them if not their software? They offer literally nothing my local credit union doesn't offer.

> I don't think there is anything technically difficult about almost any of > the consumer software facebook offers, except scale.

No argument here, but facebook at least manages to hire designers and not impose weird non-sensical patterns of auth, like "Look for this image when you log in".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> If you know your traffic well, private cloud saves a lot of money. Few years back i bet hybrid clouds will take over and for some reason it did not happen. I still believe hybrid cloud is the solution for mid size and up companies. You definitely need cloud provides for handling traffic spikes.

<comment><USER40> Nobody ever got fired for using AWS.

<comment><USER41> I am not at liberty to say the company name, but i do directly know of one person at a director level who was fired for using AWS.

They turned on encryption for an option and did not realize the huge price difference between the encrypted and unencrypted option meant $9000 per day in additional charges. After 1 month (30 days) this came to light, and he was fired.

<comment><USER42> that's not what people mean by the phrase "Nobody ever got fired for using AWS." [http://wiki.c2.com/?NobodyEverGotFiredForBuyingMicrosoft](http://wiki.c2.com/?NobodyEverGotFiredForBuyingMicrosoft)

<comment><USER41> Before that it was 'IBM' ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> If the 2 billion were saved over two years, that is an increase in profit of ~4% over those 8 quarters ((75-56)÷56÷8)§. That's a pretty good outcome.

§ = Q3: "The bank said Wednesday that net income excluding an impairment charge rose 4% to $7.5 billion, or an adjusted 75 cents a share. When including the $2.1 billion charge tied to the end of a partnership with First Data, net income fell to 56 cents a share"

</comment><comment><USER44> That implies their business would have data center costs beyond most tech companies (Lyft for example is spending $300 million with AWS over three years, Snap is spending $3 billion over five years).

Something doesn't add up here.

<comment><USER45> Tech companies don't necessarily spend more on computing resources than non- tech companies. The article says they had 200,000 servers in 60 datacenters. That is certainly more than most tech companies, and is not surprising. A large bank probably has more computing needs than someone like Lyft.

<comment><USER44> 200,000 servers isn't actually that many. 200,000 c5.xlarge's at on demand rates (which nobody with 200,000 servers pays) will cost you about $300 million a year. So they are realizing savings at about an order of magnitude higher than you'd expect cost wise.

I used to work in banking... their compute needs are actually quite basic.

I think what we're really seeing here is some creative accounting around how operations and costs are accounted for. They've got to be talking about costs of managing and operating their cloud as well, and most of those costs would be in terms of training & workforce retooling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> > Right now, the bank estimates its private cloud is 25% to 30% cheaper than > public providers, though it also recognizes that probably won't last > forever.

I am glad they shared this situation. We often here marketing telling us that public cloud is always better. It's nice to see different perspectives being shared and some details around them.

<comment><USER47> If you have $50million+ you can deploy on capex in one shot (economies of scale negotiation doesn't work well at lower numbers), and you can hire systems engineers (C/C++/Go/Rust 5+ years systems experience x 20 engineers), you can put together a _single tenant_ compute cloud needed to run a typical Internet facing web/mobile application with all the bells and whistles (lots of app server clusters, db clusters, big data clusters, GPU clusters etc with HA, scalability, security, DR etc). At this point, capex/opex cost will be easily 30% lower than the best negotiated bulk price from public cloud.

It is worth doing this if your in-house engineering team is at least 100+ app service developers and have high feature churn rate.

But be warned, your systems engineering / shared technology team should be level-headed and mature and rest of your app service engineering should be good too to pull this off well. If not, you will be in serious developer productivity pain and there won't be quick and easy fixes once you have put down the capex.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Public cloud is definitely a great value for startups. When you are small and want the flexibility and speed and the sophistication that cloud providers make possible. The premium they charge is well worth up to a certain point at least. When you are an established business with mature tech and of the size of BoA, it is a whole different math. Your investment in your own cloud if done right can be a huge saving that can give more mileage (on Wall Street) than your competitors speed in execution, esp if you are a bank, where time to market isn't exactly a winner.

</comment><comment><USER49> Outline: [https://outline.com/nDEM3d](https://outline.com/nDEM3d)

<comment><USER50> People seem to be posting hard-paywalled links more and more around here. They were supposed to be banned, but I guess the rules are selectively enforced by @dang here nowadays. The link to the article should be changed to this Outline link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> All the flexibility that the cloud offers is wasted on a large bank. I remember one of the selling points of cloud computing for developpers is that it takes months to provision a physical server in a large organisation. With [enter cloud name here] a developper can create a VM in only a few minutes!

Well, enters a typical bank bureaucracy, cost controls, approvals, etc. And now we are back to taking months to provision a VM!

</comment><comment><USER52> Is this a story about virtualization? I fail to see the distinction between data center and private cloud in this context.

<comment><USER53> I was going to explain how there's no difference but then I thought about the more facetious terminology

cloud - someone else's computers

private cloud - someone else's computers that you own???? or that nobody else uses, but in this context you also own???

<comment><USER54> Cloud also means access on-demand by API.

Private cloud usually refers to that same abstraction layer. Hardware provisioning is abstracted away from use and available on-demand from a pool, and likewise deployment works automatically via the same or an equivalent API.

That's very different from the operation of a typical company-owned datacenter from a couple of decades ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> ITT: people who didn't read the article and believed the false headline that Business Insider made up.

The 3rd sentence of the article, in bold, explains that the savings were from consolidating on-prem hardware, not from eschewing external cloud.

The article cites BofA itself at sayignthat savigns vs external cloud is tenuous at best:

> Right now, the bank estimates its private cloud is 25 to 30% cheaper than > public providers, though it also recognizes that probably won't last > forever. Still, the company believes the architecture it has built will give > it leverage in negotiating contracts with these companies

</comment><comment><USER56> I continue to be amazed that any business of more than a few hundred employees would ever consider using off-prem hosting. Cloud services are there to bootstrap a business, not maintain it.

<comment><USER57> Well the issue is that you bootstrap on AWS and then have a hard time going on premise without a major rewrite or initiative. That and you want to keep adding features and driving the product forward... it is easy to see how this happens. Plus you can have 200 people focused on things other than running ESX boxes or docker or whatever you need.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Folks are generally misinterpreting the 'cost' of the cloud by mostly looking at data centre costs, margins etc.. The 'TCO' or 'Total Cost of Ownership' of cloud services is generally much lower than otherwise.

The cloud is valuable because of the variety of features, immediately available, at very large scale, run by very credible people with $0 in capital expenditures.

In most cases, it's worth _far_ more than the price, which is why it's so popular.

In very, very few cases is it 'cheaper' to run one's own cloud given the massive operational overhead of hiring people with very specialised skills, risks all over the board, the enormous planning, extensive investments.

Wallmart must have 1000's of trucks but they don't 'roll their own' delivery vehicles, because there's an inherent degree of specialisation in making vehicles.

So yes - in some specific cases it makes sense to 'host': say Dropbox, just wants massive cheap storage, or Google, has special needs & scale & ability, or some entity has very specific privacy requirements - and of course I wish there were more variety in providers, especially localised ... but the cloud is essentially now the default hosting option and that's not going away because it makes a lot of sense.

The surpluses generated by such services are vast - it's a big step forward for everyone. Companies using AWS are probably profiting more in surplus than the margins in AWS.

</comment><comment><USER59> "Building its own cloud" = leasing data centers from Equinix or other large data center providers. Financial services have challenges using public cloud due to regulatory and compliance requirements. Most of these challenges are self made - artifacts of moving their teams from "This is how we currently do it" to a shared services model.

Curious if they are all in on providers like Redhat Openshift or Pivotal Cloud Foundry as their PaaS layer.

<comment><USER60> Given how little money Pivotal was making from Cloud Foundry and how expensive each license was, I'd bet a large sum that the answer is no.

(Some context: My last employer had an AWS bill of about $3m/year that was mostly EC2. Running PCF on top of that would have been another $2m/year in licensing. And that was after the volume discount.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> "Right now, the bank estimates its private cloud is 25 to 30% cheaper than public providers, though it also recognizes that probably won't last forever."

<comment><USER62> After a meetup this spring, someone talked my ear off about how Dell is highly motivated to have a private cloud solution that works for people.

Having Dell and Amazon in a bidding war over your next project is probably the best world you can be in.

For my money, you should run one data center in the same location with most of your tech talent, and a second one geographically distant, and regionally load balanced.

But we typically don't write our software for this, and you can't get the business to do a rewrite until they see how stupid expensive a lift and shift ends up being.

I think these narratives about saving money are typically covering up a story of how much was squandered starting five quarter ago...

<comment><USER60> Unfortunately, Dell's private cloud solution exists today, and it's an 18 layer shit sandwich of all the disparate companies that Michael Dell has stitched together into his holding empire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> I have a question: I'm doing an _ambitious_ Web site startup; current status, rushing to alpha test; and from this thread and more I wonder about servers and our _server farm_ and in-house network, that is, for the options here, in- house, co-location, AWS, Azure, etc. I'm using Microsoft's software, Windows, .NET, SQL Server, etc.

Q. For many of the reasons given in this thread, etc., I'm leaning to having our own in-house servers, server farm, etc. For that, is there a source of information I will be able to use, say, as consulting, depending on the issue, an hour, day, week, month at a time, to get us past the chuckholes in the road on the usual work -- system and network planning, installation, configuration, monitoring, diagnosis, correction, etc.? E.g., can I just call Microsoft for such issues, CloudFlare, VMWare, Cisco, etc.? Assume that money to pay for the products and consulting will not be a problem.

If the broad answer is "Yes", then that will take a lot of entries off my TODO list and let me sleep better.

Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER64> For what it's worth, I really don't like AWS - aside from their S3/Route53/CloudFront products. There is a layer of abstraction that is so minimal that you may as well roll out the services yourself & save a ton of money. Of course, if you like that layer, then that's fine too.

<comment><USER65> If you look beyond that, AWS offer layers of services that you might not realize existed.

Cloud DB with no worry about physical hardware (in addition to S3 buckets which is mostly for files). lambdas when you don't want to manage a server, cloudformation when you don't want to manually start your stack by clicking, API gateway for quick ways to create APIs without worrying about stuff. And powerful orchestration layer that connects all of these together.

In fact, a lot of these services are bootstrapped on AWS itself. If you know your way around AWS, you can really find a sweet spot where it's cheap scalable and mostly worry free. The problem is that AWS domain knowledge in itself is _deep_ and not many people know enough about AWS to avoid large amount of pitfall and inefficiencies that a knowledgeable people can quickly spot and fix/alternate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> My experience working at an aging e-commerce company that has their own cloud: totally shitty.

They used off the shelf management software that they misconfigured. Getting VMs was so painful and they never worked correctly.

When I came back from paternity leave, they had gotten no response from their automated system and deleted all my VMs even though they could have seen heavy usage. If they had manually followed up they would have gotten an out of office email but they didn't.

Those are just two of the examples of how terrible it was to use their internal cloud.

You are always going to be five years behind if you do it internally. That might be a good cost calculation and I wasn't in a position to argue.

But, it meant innovation was terrible there.

</comment><comment><USER67> Something does not make sense here. The main cost savings seem to come from using fewer servers. Why could you simply not do this on Azure or GCP or AWS? Are the advantages coming from leveraging bare metal servers? I'm a little confused.

</comment><comment><USER68> For BoA we need to consider that is a Bank and many of the information they store may be too sensitive to pass it to a third party which as we know always have security issues. Better to deal with those internally. Many factors to consider in this case: real estate, expertise in-house to build data centers, budgeting, technology required. In our case without Cloud would have been very difficult to bootstrap our business and manage it, as most of the budget was to hire engineers to work in our product and pay bill.

</comment><comment><USER69> In my opinion, a company can save money on a cloud if it has these things:

\- Access to cheap real estate

\- Access to enough human capital, especially a team of 80+ to operate all aspects of a cloud: hardware, switches, openstack / kubernetes

\- Requires scale of 20k+ servers = 320k+ VMs and a strong inclination to not host on AWS/Azure/Others.

\- Lease to servers costing about $250 / server / mo. With AMD, you could go half of that, with VMs costing $10 a month. Add network costs of $15 / 2 ports / server / month.

</comment><comment><USER70> > _" Now, it's pared that down to 70,000 servers, of which 8,000 of those are > handling the bulk of the load."_

I wonder what the other 62000 servers are doing.

<comment><USER71> Lots of dev/test, storage, R&D, BI/reporting, and miscellaneous internal business apps most likely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Bank of America should really not brag about the quality of the software it makes based on its consumer website. Maybe they should consider spending more.

</comment><comment><USER72> JPM's Jamie Dimon talks about his cloud strategy on the most recent shareholders letter, page 34. ([https://www.jpmorganchase.com/corporate/investor- relations/d...](https://www.jpmorganchase.com/corporate/investor- relations/document/ceo-letter-to-shareholders-2018.pdf))

Note that he leaves open the option for both public and private cloud.

</comment><comment><USER73> So one thing people seem to be ignoring is that cloud != automated provisioning of VMs by engineers.

There's so much more AWS, GCP and Azure offer these days that trading away all the stuff like metrics, monitoring, dynamo-dB, s3, lambda, scalable RDS, Spark pipelines and generally a whole suite of products that go into building a modern web app for some scripts that can provision on demand seems to be a poor choice.

</comment><comment><USER55> Counteractual: Suppose BofA wasted $2B per year by building its own cloud. Or is BofA decided to migrate from woncloud to AWS, and wasted $2B in the process? Would a CEO make a public statement about that? Or would they fiddle the numbers (which are impossible for an outsider to verify) to make their decision look like a winner?

</comment><comment><USER47> 70000 servers in 23 datacenters – sounds awful. Why have it spread out so much? 350 million capex for 70k high end server DC setup may make sense.

$2B = 40% savings means their opex was $5B and now it's $3B. That is high expense. Guessing most of it is licensed software costs? Like Oracle on every single core?!?

</comment><comment><USER74> I'm not so convinced how great of a job they did.Bank of America has by far the worst user experience I've ever seen. I had an experience recently where I changed my password, and after 2 days my new password stopped working and my old one did.

<comment><USER75> That's not good, but it's also only one of the many, many things a bank does, though. The most important one is keeping the money safe of course. It's entirely possible for a bank to do some things right and other things wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> This is simply a fixed cost vs variable cost decision. Fixed costs give you operating leverage which amplified your earnings in good times and bad. Variable costs don't have the downside, but impact your margins.

</comment><comment><USER77> Do banks using third-party cloud services just trust that the provider won't abuse their data? Do they actually store financial data there, or just use them for front-end stuff like websites?

<comment><USER78> The trust will come from very stringent contracts (beyond the regular contracts that other customers would use), third-party certifications that the provider achieves, and the provider being covered by certain aspects of the regulations that cover banks (or healthcare or whatever).

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> That BofA had >$2B/year of IT spending is the real story here.

</comment><comment><USER80> That's almost as much as they make on overdraft fees!

<comment><USER81> That's unfair - they were only fined $67 million for fraudulent overdraft fees! Though I have to wonder how much they're currently making by inducing every one of their customers to write fraudulent checks.

Though there is something comforting about a predictably evil company though. Much more straightforward than "do no evil" while building a surveillance machine that would make a Stasi officer blush, or "this helps our users" while hindering Hong Kong's protests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> To quote Steve Oberlin of Nvidia ( quoting House M.D.) about cloud customers... "Everybody lies."

</comment><comment><USER83> Can anyone who has worked on Bank of America comment on if any of the things they build actually worked?

<comment><USER84> This must be a jab, but obviously yes.

Last year they had $28 billion in net income. With that kind of money you can hire the best in the world to build literally whatever you want. They could go build a space shuttle if they felt like it - probably without much trouble.

In the unlikely situation that it didn't work, they'd pay someone else to fix it or re-do it. The least likely (albeit not unprecedented) end situation is that 'none of the things actually work'.

<comment><USER42> Boeing can't even make an airplane without trouble and you think BoA could churn out a space shuttle? The space shuttle program was estimated to have cost $200B.

<comment><USER84> Boeing has made literally tens of thousands of airplanes "without trouble". One debacle doesn't mean they "can't even make an airplane".

"Space Shuttle" was rhetorical, but yeah, they could churn out a space shuttle. They could buy SpaceX and use their engineers to do it. BofA has $2.3 TRILLION in assets.

The point is you can buy expertise. It's not like a bunch of bank tellers coded up a cloud platform. Nor would you have a regional branch manager running an aerospace program. You'd hire people that know how to do those things the same as any other expert at any other company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> Obviously small businesses don't have the option of building their own cloud, but there is a middle ground: use public clouds, but avoid coupling yourself to them. Most cloud providers provide servers that can be treated like a barebones Linux server, and that's all you really need to be productive with most server applications.

<comment><USER86> Then just use a colo center. It's worked for us for close to 20 years.

Last time someone had to perform hardware maintenance was at least 3 months ago. If you're small enough (20-30 servers for us) the things mostly run themselves. Any other overhead we have would be present if we were just using something like EC2.

The bulk of our hardware is 10 years old. We have some servers that are 17 years old and still chugging along.

<comment><USER85> > Last time someone had to perform hardware maintenance was at least 3 months > ago. If you're small enough (20-30 servers for us) the things mostly run > themselves.

If those servers are production servers, I'd say that's not small--you're already scaled to the point where you have hired a whole person (or two) to do server work, no?

I've worked at places where I'm the only technical person. I know enough to set up a Django server, but the reality is I'm not an IT guy, I'm a developer. Paying for a few cloud servers means we don't have to hire anyone to do server maintenance, which gives me an entire person's salary as a server budget before we have to consider whether hiring a person would be better. A lot of companies never reach the size where that becomes a concern.

Of course everybody wants to get big enough that they need a server farm, but as long as you don't vendor-lock yourself, moving from a virtual Linux server on the cloud to a physical server in a colo center is fairly trivial.

My personal website has been running on a single $10/mo Digital Ocean server for 5 years. I think it would be very difficult to beat that price with a colo center and physical hardware. Most businesses are obviously larger than that, but I think it's a bit of an overreach to claim that it's always more expensive to run on the cloud. It just isn't, for many real-life situations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> "the cloud" = your data is now our data on our computers (I think we all know this). When companies like Microsoft start saving my files to their personal servers as default, I hate you. Stop.

<comment><USER88> When did that happen? Assuming we are not talking about Azure China.

</comment></comment><comment> Account123481-x why do I not believe this?

<comment><USER89> Serious question: Why is it that everyone believes that going to the cloud is cheaper? How is it that AWS can buy the same servers, same switches same everything, make a fat profit and somehow it's sell it cheaper than you can do it? I get that there are economies of scale, but not 2-3x right?

Sure, you don't need those admins to rack up new servers, but don't you just trade those costs for costs around AWS "devops"? (IAM / authentication anyone?).

I keep hearing execs telling me that moving from self-hosted to AWS is going to save a ton of money ... but I just don't believe it. I would assume if you're that bad at running an IT business in-house, you'll be just as bad at it in the cloud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> Bad title.

They didn't switch from AWS to private cloud.

They consolidated 60 data centers with 200k servers to 23 data centers and 70k servers.

<comment><USER91> The title isn't bad: "ignoring" implies they were never on AWS and just went their own way.

<comment><USER92> The savings implies they saved $2B over AWS. I can't read the article since I don't have a BI account, but unless they saved $2B over AWS (rather than $2B over their previous infrastructure) it's definitely misleading.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER93> cloud will always be more expensive than bare metal. period. cloud is great to start out when you have no clue about how much power you will need to satisfy your customers and to be flexible enough to cover some unexpected spikes. but once you're out there earning, the only reason to stay on cloud is comfort. business-wise it is a black hole for money. many will argue that cost of personnel to manage your own infra does not favour it over cloud. but if you do the math you will see that savings when renting only three bare metal servers each month will pay a full-time salary for a sysadmin. you don't even need to own your own hardware. the bare metal rentals these days are insanely low and if you truly want to save each penny, you buy your own because in a matter of months you get yor investment back on saved fees alone. the thing is that these big tech companies convinced so many people these days that cloud is the only way that they cannot even fathom how anybody can run on their own hardware. the new sysadmins are already "brainwashed" and inexperienced this way and the old school guys that have experienced managing their own hardware are slowly "dying" out. soon, just a mention of managing your own hardware will become a joke to these newcommers when in reality the cloud was never- ever a cheaper option to go with in the first place. not to mention that these days we have so much technology to make things easy(kubernetes, rancher, proxmox, docker, lxc..) that it is quite laugable to fear bare metal and religiously praise the cloud like some kind of savior.

</comment><comment><USER94> Get outta my dreams. Get into my cloud.

</comment><comment><USER95> 200K servers to serve ~50M households? Seems rather inefficient. What were they doing with all this hardware?

</comment><comment><USER96> This is completely false - I imagine they didn't take into account how much the migration and upkeep actually cost them. AWS's promise is not that its infrastructure itself is cheaper in terms of number of servers, or otherwise. Its cheaper in that it helps automate a lot of manual things away.

<comment><USER97> I had experience in Quartz (BofA cloud), and deploying is 100 times easier than AWS, everything is automated. Imagine building a cloud service where you trust all your clients, and all must share the same information if they have the correct auth, what I trying to say is that their use-case actually made it simpler, that's where the savings in software had came from.

<comment><USER98> So we'll hear about a BoA hack in a few years where the attacker got into the cloud somehow and then had unlimited access to all the other servers? Great. Exactly what I want from a bank. /s

<comment><USER99> Or you can look at it as a single correct auth and encryption mechanism is shared company wide vs each individual teams intern inventing new was to base64 encode your password. Glass half full or empty

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> I have a bullet proof plan to earn a $10m bonus in my two years as CTO at <Large Firm>:

1\. Identify retarded firm that uses AWS or Azure like money grows on trees AND without too much AWS lock-in

2\. Join as CTO and move infra to OVH

(2.1 Convince OVH to not irritate international customers by making my browser show "Translate this page?" for EVERY SINGLE page, even on us.ovhcloud.com, because they HAVE to show their French lineage at all times instead of just having English pages in English! They've already improved their Customer Service a lot, so I have great hopes)

3\. Reduce server costs by 4X

4\. Profit!

Seriously. Unless you really need auto-scaling or one of the other unique features of AWS / Azure products, you don't need to pretend you're the next Facebook or Netflix.

Also seriously: de-cloudification is a great business idea.</comment>


Ask HN: How to make effective resolutions? - <AUTHOR>

New year is coming. Every year people make new year's resolutions and forget them after few days. So what are the effective ways to fulfill the resolutions? It might be interesting to run an experiment and see what most likely contribute to a successful resolution.<p>* set up clear goal<p>* make it private/public<p>* have someone remind you<p>* reward/punish yourself<p>* join a group of people with similar interests<p>... <comment><USER2> New year's resolutions don't work. The resolutions are usually unreasonable ("I'll eat only healthy foods from now on") and external ("I'd like to be seen as a person who runs every morning").

If you have never achieved your resolution before, why would you succeed just because it's 2015? What happens when you fail the first time? Maybe start hating the challenge, or yourself, and quit?

If the resolution is something you really cared about start doing it today. Keep the change modest ("go for a walk once a week" vs. "run every day") and accept the fact that you are going to fail every now and then. Joining a group with similar interests works if it makes the action more fun. Having someone to run with is good but having someone to punish you for not running isn't that useful.

</comment><comment><USER3> Dude these things are like celebrity marriages, they never last. That said here's my tip for self improvement accountability: [https://www.lift.do](https://www.lift.do)

<comment><AUTHOR> laf... btw, I hate site that requires signup to show anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Measure your progress in an objective way.</comment>


Intermediate Vim: Sessions - <AUTHOR> http://rkd.me.uk/intermediate-vim-sessions.html <comment><USER2> Nice idea on using an alias to load the last session, Rob! I'm using it. I did a small video screencast on sessions for those who learn visually :)

[http://thinkosaur.com/vimwatch/1/sessions](http://thinkosaur.com/vimwatch/1/sessions)

PS - Is anyone else constantly amazed by the quality of vim's documentation?</comment>


Blogged 30+ times 1 week into launch. Power of visually appealing hardware - <AUTHOR> http://www.tangibleinstruments.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad to answer questions if anyone is interested in further details on how we did this.

coverage: bit.ly/1Je2ejx</comment>


Ask HN: So I have my .com domain – which .* should I buy as well? - <AUTHOR>

I read PG blog about changing names (http://paulgraham.com/name.html) and although my startup is not US based, the US market is very likely important ;-) So now the name X is changed to <Y> (because http://jsomers.net/blog/speed-matters).
So far so good.
But you can imagine, if the .com was available today (unbelievable, BTW, yes), then <name>.whatever is very likely available as well. So should I buy them all ?! What do other startups do ? Maybe just the important ones ? Which ones would that be ? <comment><USER2> This really depends. If you are targeting a local market get a domain in that country also. If you are a tech firm you may also want to get .io The truth is: Nobody will really bother about domains beside your .com

</comment><comment><USER3> Once you have .com, the other one that I've found useful is .net. Use .com for public facing stuff and .net for internal/backofficey/partner stuff. If you ever get big enough for international domains, congratulations.

</comment><comment><USER4> Seems pretty common to grab .com, .net, and .org. I wouldn't worry about the others.

<comment><AUTHOR> No offense, but just wondering: this is from an American point of view ? Or from experience ?

Because I was thinking of big countries TLD as well. Like .uk, .de, .in etc. But then again, where does it end...

<comment><USER5> Many country TLDs require the registrant to be domiciled in the country. And the degree of domicile/nexus widely varies, from simply having an address, to having a physical presence.

If you're just starting out you simply may not be able to set up all of the various legal structures to comply with the various CCTLD domain name registry requirements.

.com/net/org do not require a US nexus (which is separate from whether or not the US considers such domains to be under US jurisdiction).

For services I care about I grab com/net/org/biz/info as well as misspellings or variations on the domain name. I stopped registering CCTLD variants except for occasional .co and .me domains, because of the domicile/nexus requirements (.us also as a nexus requirement).</comment></comment></comment>


Speeka: Instant, anonymous chatrooms - <AUTHOR> http://speeka.net/

<comment><AUTHOR> Open source, powered by node.js / nowjs, uses Embedly for embedding links posted to the chatroom.</comment>


Employee mood tracking – CompanyMood - <AUTHOR> https://www.company-mood.com/

<comment><USER2> If you need a dashboard to figure out that there is a morale problem in the ranks, something is _deeply_ wrong with your company.

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course CompanyMood can never replace the personal communication within a company. But it can assist you to improve the work climate, providing a simple tool for mood tracking and suggestions.</comment></comment>


Google offering free Chromebooks to Indian schools - <AUTHOR> http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/hardware/Google-offering-free-Chromebooks-to-Indian-schools/articleshow/28000046.cms <comment><USER2> I see there's a mini-shitstorm going on here, but let's say Google is in fact a business acting in its own self-interest to some degree, which seems reasonable. Let's say they're giving away Chromebooks because a) they wish to do good in the world, _and_ b) they'd like to get more people using Google services, and this seems like a rather effective method of gaining long-term users. Now, ignoring the fact that you can indeed use crouton, enable dev mode, or otherwise "hack the platform" so to speak, where's the actual issue in having these kids using Google services? Google's offering them _free computers._ Does we honestly think that a poor kid in India wouldn't eagerly give written consent to become a user of Google's services, letting Google benefit from that as they do from any similar user, _especially_ when they're not being forced in any way whatsoever to continue doing so in the future?

I'm a goddamn middle-class American, I believe I have a reasonable knowledge of what Google will get out of this deal (as they do every day from my heavy usage of their services), and _I_ would accept the free computer. Even at that, poor kids without regular access to the internet aren't your average highly tech-literate, open-source-aware HN user, and I really doubt they care about Google's relatively responsible* use of collected information in exchange for a rather nice free netbook, even if they _were_ fully aware of its implications.

*Sure, I understand this is an arguable definition, but in the larger scheme of things, it seems fair to say that Google doesn't have a malicious use of the data in mind.

<comment><USER3> I love quoting RMS. "What schools should refuse to do is teach dependence. Those corporations offer free samples to schools for the same reason tobacco companies distribute free cigarettes to minors: to get children addicted. They will not give discounts to these students once they've grown up and graduated."

Surely this applies only if you consider chromebooks as free and this not true atleast by RMS standards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's interesting that Google is hardy being scrutinized for using exactly the same tactics for which Microsoft was vilified a decade ago.

</comment><comment><USER5> This deal was probably made pre-Snowden revelations. I doubt any of the world's governments are so eager to deploy US-controlled machines in their institutions and schools, especially if they are "cloud-only".

<comment><USER6> But it's free!!!

<comment><USER7> So was the Trojan Horse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It must be so different going to school these days. I feel excited for our future kids!

<comment><USER9> I remember going through the majority of my primary education in the 2000's and being dismayed by the gap between public school education and the resources of the internet. It was such a weird, and unfortunate, period of denial. Maybe we're still experiencing that chasm between the way that society functions and the power of the internet to enrich our lives, but it seems like we're definitely inching closer to my childhood idealizations.

<comment><USER10> I'm currently doing my A levels in a small school in the Upper Palatinate. The problem is - at least in Germany - that some schools have to invest the money they get in fundamental thing only, like sanitary facilities. The school I'm attending doesn't even have WARM water AT ALL! NOWHERE! On the other side, there are new built schools that can invest their money in Smart Boards and video projectors. Another point is that most of the "old" teachers simply don't know how to use these fancy new things (including computers in general) and there are also teachers that are so fascinated by Facebook and BayernMoodle ([http://www.bayernmoodle.de/](http://www.bayernmoodle.de/)) that they more or less force their students to use it on weekends in order to give them exercises. More or less, when I tell my mother about the lessons (she went to the same school as I do), I often realize that sometimes neither the teachers nor the way eduction is being done changed all. I would be happy about new books, some on mine are far older than myself. Maybe others have different experiences, but there is a lot of room for improvement.

<comment><USER11> Don't waste your time worrying about school too much. Make sure you get into things like [https://www.deutsche-schuelerakademie.de](https://www.deutsche- schuelerakademie.de) or [http://www.deutsche- juniorakademien.de](http://www.deutsche-juniorakademien.de).

(Their Alumni organisation ([http://www.cde-ev.de/](http://www.cde-ev.de/)) is actually open for everybody, and I can only recommend joining. [https://mind- hochschul-netzwerk.de/](https://mind-hochschul-netzwerk.de/) is also worth a look.)

<comment><USER10> Wow! This is great! I've already been to a so-called "Ferienseminar für besonders begabte und interessierte Schülerinnen und Schüler", an event I've been invited to and which I can only recommend, but these links are great! Thank you! Since I'm doing an additional test, I'll try getting into some of these programmes.

<comment><USER11> Oh, none of these programmes are tests. If you a into that kind of thing, you should also compete in the Mathematik-Olympiade (and physics and chemistry olympiad, too). There are also Bundeswettbewerb Mathematik and Bundeswettbewerb Informatik, that are fun to take part in.

Drop me a line (email in profile), if you want to learn more. I grew up in Germany, but ended up all over the world, currently I'm in Singapore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think a much better ethical investment would be XO laptops from OLPC, Internet-in-a-Box devices, and grants to train local teachers on how to use both.

</comment><comment><USER13> I commend Google for it, but my inner voice is somewhat skeptical that this is a great way to get kids hooked on Google's services. Then again, having a Chromebook is way better than some crappy linux machine/cheap windows laptop. So I think its a win-win for both parties.

<comment><USER14> _Then again, having a Chromebook is way better than some crappy linux machine /cheap windows laptop._

Why? It's a much more limited device with much less potential for learning essential skills.

A Chromebook can only be used to surf the web. It's the polar opposite of what an educational institute needs.

<comment><USER13> It depends. A regular laptop can do more things, but most of the time students just need a laptop to research and write articles and the Chromebook does that very well, without exposing the internals of a traditional desktop system.

If I'm a college student, I really don't want to deal with OS upgrades, malware and other things. I just want something that works out of the box and Chromebook does that perfectly. If I really want to tinker, it's not that hard to install a linux distro in a Chromebook and not everyone desires to tinker with their computers.

<comment><USER15> Say you use Windows, 1\. Turn on automatic updates (default option, I think) 2\. Use something like MS Security essentials

And, if you use Linux, 1\. Update regularly, again I guess most distros have a default option to check for updates on boot. And, you don't need to upgrade your OS unless you want/have to.

How much more do you want to dumb it down? For basic use as you mentioned, to research and write articles, you are almost doing nothing already with windows/linux

<comment><USER16> ChromeOS is dumbed down so much more than that, insofar as nothing ever breaks, update reboots only take a few (<10) seconds, behavior encountered is always 100% predictable, and with a browser being the only available interactive display mode, WYSIWYG. My wife has a MacBook and I have a cheap Acer Revo mini-PC, but she also has a new HP Chromebook and I spend most of my time on either the Pixel in my office or the Samsung Chromebook I'm typing on now. Except for things like needing a traditional OS for random third party hardware support (e.g. Fitbit sync, printer, scanner) or extremely rare requirements for MS Office or photo management, we'd function very well with just browsers.

I know this is an aside, but one of the things that irritates me most about the modern web, and Google's "solution" especially, is photo management. Picasa on the desktop is simplistic but generally 100% ok, but Google+ Photos leads to horrifically unpleasant workflows, and god help you if you want print anything or share on non-Google properties.

<comment><USER17> I can't upvote strongly enough about the photo stuff.

Recently I discovered that Google+, Facebook etc. all like to interpret "sharing" a photo to mean sharing a link to the page with the photo on it, not to actually share the photo, which is what the user really wants to have happen, not to mention the PITA this is to automate because it suddenly means these photos are behind authorisation walls. (This is on top of how aggressively Google tries to get any photos you take, or send via Gmail, into G+ in the first place).

Quite honestly I've had it with any cloud service that acts like this, and now choose to spam them with irrelevant nonsense of no consequence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> They're probably hoping for something like this: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3ipm3fDU60](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3ipm3fDU60).</comment>


To nourish friendships despite being too busy. - <AUTHOR>

Hey friends,
I created Recap to solve an everyday challenge- to nourish friendships despite being too busy.
To recap is to jot down memorable details from conversations with friends.
I've charged myself to take a few minutes out of my day to recap fun facts I've come to learn about my friends.
It's quite neat, over time I've found my friends more interesting and more dear than I remember, true story :)
http://recap.ly Sign up for an account!
If you want to see my recaps, visit: http://recap.ly/jason
Thanks,
Jason <comment><USER2> I had a friend who used to write down notes of his friends and acquaintances in a little notebook. [1] He'd use this for exactly the purposes you describe. I thought it was a great idea but too much work for me.

I'll give Recap a try!

[1] This is very meta, but gladly I remembered this fact about my friend without writing it down!</comment>


Why don't Macs support multiple monitors? - <AUTHOR> http://cafe.elharo.com/ui/why-dont-macs-support-multiple-monitors/

<comment><USER3> "Maybe if I make my title sensational enough, people will actually read my stupid blog post about a nitpick that most other people would probably consider to be a good design choice."

<comment><USER4> Well, it might be a sensationalist article, but it does bug me that mac's don't have the menu bar on the second monitor. To me, I rarely use it, I just find the disjunction between the screens slightly jarring...

I can understand that it might be far more hassle than it's worth to support and code, but what might be a good design reason for not putting it on other monitors?

<comment><USER3> It wastes space and then you have to think about a way to display two separate items which represent the same data but which can be in different states.

If you're using the menu bar so much that having it on the other screen causes you to be unable to use the second display, you should consider learning keyboard shortcuts for the menu items instead of clicking on them manually each time. They should be labeled in an application's menus, if it follows Mac design guidelines (and common sense.)

<comment><USER5> And with Snow Leopard, you can assign your own keyboard shortcuts - <USER2> they'll even show up in the menus! System Preferencea->Keyboard=>Keyboard Shortcuts->Application Shortcuts (click on the plus sign)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can see the point of the writer; but at the same time, if I _was_ double- full-screening, as shown in the post's screenshots, I would choose to hide the menu bar too! (For instance, I can double-full-screen terminals, and set the menu bar to auto-hide.)

If I'm _not_ in pure full-screen mode, I actually find it distinctly un-Mac- like to force windows to use up every last pixel of space. That's kind of the point...the Mac's document-centered focus, ability to hide apps, use Exposé, and yes, menu bar, make it far easier to have 12 completely unrelated things open and use them effectively (compared to Windows and the Linux window managers I know about, anyway).

One tidbit people might not notice, is that the OS lets windows "stick" to the top of the screen; this works both under the menu bar and under the top "edge" of your 2nd display. So it's pretty easy to arrange windows anyway.

<comment><USER7> On Linux there are dynamic window managers available. They automate window placement to maximize use of screen real estate. Many are keyboard driven and seem difficult to use. I usually have 15-30 windows open so I've been looking at them as alternatives to ALT + TAB.</comment></comment>


Ask YC:  What is your company's datacenter footprint? - patrickg-zill

I admit to being very curious about how much datacenter space startups and others are using (either renting of individual machines or of racks).
Right now all of my space comes to about 2 racks' worth, including stuff I run on behalf of my customers.
We all know about e.g. Second Life and their 2000 (equivalent to about 50 racks or more, depending on density and how much other stuff is in the rack) servers.
Are you running on one or two servers to start?
Or are you using 5 racks each in 2 different DCs to be redundant and ready for insane levels of traffic?
Do you have a growth strategy, or are Amazon's services what you intend to use when you get bigger? <comment> patrickg-zill Amazingly, I would have thought that datacenter space would peak at some point as more virtualization, and more CPU power in the same space (4-core and dual- CPUs = 8 cores in 1U) takes hold, but it seems that more and more DCs are being constructed due to strong demand.

There is a publicly traded company called Digital Realty Trust (NYSE: DLR) that focuses on buying and building colocation facilities etc.

They are being upgraded, even though this is a "down" market and we can expect corporate spending to be throttled somewhat.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm several months away from launching (SaaS product), but since our service is targeted towards paid clients, we figure the growth will be much smaller. We'll probably use S3 for daily backups when we go live, growth after that will be determined based on sales volume, etc.</comment>


Ask YC: Who here still plays WoW? - <AUTHOR>

Every time I get back into this game I get addicted. So who here is very productive at work and still has time to play? How many hours do you spend playing? <comment><USER2> Sry...no time for WoW. Play only news.yc.com

</comment><comment><USER3> Never have.</comment>


Clojure adds AOT compilation - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/msg/58e3f8e5dfb876c9?pli=1 <comment><USER2> This is great news.

I've finished reading the fist draft of the Pragmatic Programmers new book on Clojure and I can't wait until they release another draft. The first draft only contains about half the chapters.

<comment><USER3> Glad to hear that you liked the book. I am looking forward to getting the beta book myself, but have three books on my table right now. Hopefully soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If one were to read only this site, one would have the feeling that Clojure were taking over the programming language world. Clojure is the skinny jeans of the programming world - it may be cool right now, but in 5 years you'll be feeling slightly ashamed that you jumped on the fashion train.

<comment><USER5> Do you care to say why you think that?

There haven't been too many people who have really had bad things to say about Clojure once they've accepted the fact that it targets the JVM.

I know I used to be one of those guys who reflexively went "Java? GROSS!", but then I actually took a look at the language and think that it's one of the better thought out languages to emerge in the past few years.

[Edit: Sorry, my tone seemed a little confrontational here - I'm genuinely curious as to what you perceive the problems with Clojure to be? So far I haven't heard many negatives about it and I'm curious to hear what people think those negatives are. So far, the only real "negative" I've heard is that Clojure is not multi-paradigm in the way CL is.]

<comment><USER4> It does not have to have a problem to be a fad. Programming languages all require a big time investment in learning them - so those that exist tend to stay around. People only change languages when there are very clear benefits. Clojure seems to have pulled up to the same level as other much older and better known programming languages - there are no benefits (at the moment) to it that would make the mass of programmers switch to it.

Ruby is a good language, but it only became popular when it offered a clear benefit.

For a language to enter the mainstream and stay in the mainstream, it has to do a lot more than just not be bad. It has to be better than others in some way.

(By the way, being a functional language does not make it better, it makes it worse, since most programmers have trouble grasping functional concepts)

At the moment, clojure may not have any negatives, but it does not have any strong positives, so I don't see why it would catch on.

<comment><USER6> Suppose your arguments are true. Here's why clojure is destined to be big.

Clear benefit: you have Java at your disposal, while being "new and cool." From a library standpoint it is Java + extras.

Functional does not make it better: if there are two types of people, one that prefers functional, one imperative, go ahead! Let the functional use clj, the imperative use java. Now you can compile to .class and use either paradigm!

I don't code lisp regularly, but I'm convinced clojure is the NBT and so I'm preparing to jump ship after it matures :D

<comment><USER4> Should we take a bet on that? I say that with no extra framework coming up that utilizes clojure, clojure will forever remain a small niche product.

<comment><USER2> > Should we take a bet on that? I say that with no extra framework coming up > that utilizes clojure, clojure will forever remain a small niche product.

I'm not sure how Clojure will play out but remember it's only a few years old. You could have said the same thing about Ruby in 1997.

<comment><USER7> Clojure's first birthday was just a few weeks ago.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>