throwawayacct4q

I would love to see those training materials! I don't see any contact info, but maybe you could shoot me an email to the email in my profile?

Point well taken. But as many have mentioned in this thread, it is very hard to hire good people and the people I have already have deep knowledge of the systems and business and are good at what they do. Just from that efficiency perspective it makes sense to retrain per fiduciary responsibility. The fact that I can keep lots and lots of people working instead of terminating is an awesome bonus that I feel great about.

I have built multi-cloud, totally cloud-agnostic deployments at my previous company with terraform, for really interesting reasons. At least for tf even if you are spinning up a VM and installing something like postgres on it (cloud agnostic, no managed services), rewriting is required because the order of operations can be different in infrastructure building, different modules, different vars, etc. You can use your code for one cloud as a template for the new one, but you do need to maintain a set of scripts for each cloud in my experience.

Yes, 1000%. I have many friends who went to (and are now principals at) MBB and I hear all their stories and I would not under any circumstances use a large consultancy for this advice, I can guess their advice before even contacting them.

These are really helpful insights. Thank you. Position wise yes, high level newly-minted CTO-ish-type office sounds about right, sorry to be vague. Decision is made, implementation and vendor selection is the hard part. I have already moved many applications as proof of concept and the savings seen is one driver of this change, and me being the one that moved them is one reason I get to be involved/doing/advising/engineering this. We are not FAANG and not located in cool locales so harder to attract great talent.

The cloud vendors are in fact already offering to take on a lot of this work of transitioning, which I am avoiding to avoid lock in at all costs.

And for others reading it's not UPS/Fedex just to throw that out there, I saw another thread on UPS yesterday trying to move huge organization's ops to 21st century and was trying to think of examples of what I assumed were large legacy companies that are not core tech and those popped to mind. That thread also served as a catalyst as I'm also wrestling with moving a huge orgs ops to the 21st century.

I have taken your advice on email: throwawayacct4q@gmail.com

No. As an engineer myself, this is exactly what I'm working to avoid. I know we could terminate, but these people have built careers and have deep knowledge of the systems and business, I'm not letting them go without at least giving them the choice to retrain.

You really have this completely wrong. I am a systems/network engineer and am newer to the business side. Asking here to get some upsight into the people side. Thank you for pointing out that things run on servers, that was news to me.

Maybe so, I haven't made this move before, which is part of the reason I'm asking here, as unlikely as it may be that "someone who is in this position would be asking on HN." Sorry for being vague on all of this. Regardless:

1.) No specific discount, this is standard, public pricing on major commercial clouds, with some tricks applied like reserved instances, which is part of the reason I am not worried about low prices first and then ballooning pricing later,

2.) Our operations and maintenance and sustaining are in fact more expensive that anyone would reasonably expect, I believe partially due to vendors getting their hooks in decades ago and expanding scope and increasing prices, I've walked the data center floors and coded with the ops teams.

It is #2 that is really hitting us. I have personally moved several apps as a PoC and you wouldn't believe the savings, or maybe you would, which is even more when not ported 1:1 but used in conjunction with smaller VMs and autoscaling.

I would like to retrain to to end all manual configuration and have the current workforce take over all of this, which is a big deal for me personally. Thank you for the response.

I’m unclear why it was flagged. It’s a legitimate question and problem I’m facing. I totally recognize these improvements are better overall, which is why I’m doing it, just wondering a bit about the people side of it.

Best way to retrain without having to pay AWS a huge fee for all the certs?

Thousands, many close to retirement age. Think a company like UPS/Fedex that isn't at its core a tech company but with tech datacenters for logistics and billions in revenue.

Our business is an old, traditional business that happens to have lots of data centers for legacy reasons. Even though we spend $BBB on data centers, they're not the core of the business and a very small part of overall revenue. Realistically, even if we didn't move from data centers we would be good as long as the core non-tech business functioned.

Actually the cost savings hinge on the massive cost savings from moving to a commercial cloud, laying off workforce would save more, but would prefer to save a bunch by moving to cloud and keep the workforce for other things.