The Cost Center Trap

Re:The Cost Center Trap by stcredzero on Monday November 20, 2017 @01:06PM (#15741800)

Let’s face it, unless there are mitigating circumstances, IT departments that started out as cost centers are going to remain cost centers even when the company attempts a digital transformation

AWS and the Google Cloud are evidence of the possibility of escape. Are there any writeups for how they came about? (Particularly in the case of AWS.)

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Re:The Cost Center Trap by user5994461 on Monday November 20, 2017 @05:49PM (#15744077)

They came about because any fortune 500 has thousands of developers and critical software to run and they have to manage the hardware to run it.

You will find an in house equivalent of the cloud in every single big company. Except, the software and the UI will be terrible because they have much less resources and competence than Amazon/Google.

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Re:The Cost Center Trap by rm_-rf_slash on Monday November 20, 2017 @01:13PM (#15741852)

I don’t know any write ups, but in short, AWS was a solution to the variable demand for Amazon’s, well, web services. Demand peaked considerably during holiday shopping months but otherwise remained far too low to justify keeping all of those peak demand servers running Amazon.com full time, so they were rented out to companies that actually had similar problems of peak demand. In particular, the Victoria’s Secret fashion show is a great example of extreme peak demand and scalability for a web service that otherwise attracts relatively little traffic most of the year.

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Re:The Cost Center Trap by wallflower on Monday November 20, 2017 @02:23PM (#15742405)

Origin of AWS is quite famous.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12022915

Yegge's famous rant about Bezo's 2002 mandate https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX

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