commentary

I’m beginning to wonder whether companies really understand cloud technology implications? I was looking at an AWS Lambda function that scrapes a well known website recently and happened to take a look at the site front page. There’s a ‘jobs’ link. I sees. I clicks. The one cloud job they had had no salary mentioned, and the following ‘perks’.. 25 days of holiday a year Flexible holiday (Buy & Sell scheme) Rental deposit loan Life assurance (4x basic salary) 2 company parties a year Private health cover for you and your immediate family Cash plan scheme for dental, optical and physio appointments Contributory stakeholder pension scheme Opportunity to participate in share save scheme Enhanced maternity and paternity leave Bike to work scheme Interest free season ticket loan Eye test voucher Fruit and endless coffee and tea It strikes me as odd, because all these benefits are real-world things, not cloud oriented....

In business, never, ever, ever ignore costs. Cloud is just one aspect of business and so, like rents, salaries, taxes and so on, it can’t be ignored either. Cloud costs are tidal in nature and that’s perhaps why it gets unnoticed for a long time. S3 storage is a classic. Let’s say S3 costs £2,500 this month. Next month £2,750. Month after, £2,979. And yet, by the end of the year the organisation will be forking out over £5k in S3 costs with no decrease in sight....

Do you really need to use office 365? It’s a question worth asking. So, we’ve been using office since it came out in 1995 or so and it’s still more or less the same basic thing. You write a doc, use a template, tweak the formatting, write the document, do some tables, tweak the tables, tweak the pagination, proof read it, tweak the sizing again, then print, load letter A4, then reboot the printer, then load A4, tweak the tables one more time, then send the document and that’s it, done....