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.
2 Billion per year buys a lot of R&D. So, while Amazon is great for small to mid sized companies, BoA is huge and would need massive discounts to consider using Amazon.
Amazon can invest heavily in new tech because it has millions of customers who get the benefit. BofA can only invest in new tech to the degree that it benefits one (admittedly large) customer. This makes the decision seem more suspect in the long-run.
To the degree that BofA has needs that are unique just to itself, and do not overlap other large business's use cases, this is true. But that seems like an awfully small degree.
A billion dollars sounds like a ton of money on HN, but that's a thousand person tech team for 3 or 4 years. It's enough to do some good tech, but it's very, very easy to spend that much engineering capacity.
This is 2 billion dollars per year. That’s 6-8,000 people working full time indefinitely. Further they don’t need to spend that on staff they can have a large dev team, better hardware, more bandwidth, a 100 person support team 24/7 365, and still save money.
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.
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
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
Well that's the same with any cloud provider, one compromised account with enough access could be catastrophic. In BofA there is an AWS IAM equivalent. Also the BofA cloud is not accesible from the Internet.
If you manage things right its not that hard. Unfortunately there are not all that many good devops people. Expect to pay them as much as higher end devs. But overall you can save a ton of money hiring some of those and passing on the outrageous AWS markup on CPU and bandwidth.
