I worked on the internal BOA cloud. My team wrote software to procure VM's via a website, versus the older (still current) way of doing it manually.
There are two things worth considering. The BOA cloud is slow. That is to say, it is hard to procure machines to get your projects going. There is a lot of control on who will be paying for them. There is also A LOT of staff to manage it. So those 2 Billion could easily be tweaked downward when you consider the staff and lost of agility.
On the flip side, AWS is hella expensive. To do the things that they do it would cost A LOT of money. Maybe even more than they think. I have seen (and maybe a lot of people here also) small companies with million dollar AWS bills. So this number can also be tweaked up when you consider dozens of teams each having their way (at BOA scale) on the AWS console.
That's generally the economic case put out in cloud planning: a startup or expansion does great in the cloud with quick time to market, but once that business has matured and the risk is gone the assets move in-house because it's wildly cheaper.
And something that seemingly everyone forgets: it's not black and white... you can have some things in the cloud while you have some thing on-prem, leveraging scalable infrastructure and redundancy while also keeping your core assets fully under your control. It's pretty easy to make an internal S3 replacement, it's hard to make a better S3.
not necessarily. for each of these “we build our own cloud” stories there’s quite a few more stories of large enterprises saving tons switching away from their own cloud. BOA themselves know their savings won’t last and they’ll be switching back. They’re already in negotiations
"I have seen (and maybe a lot of people here also) small companies with million dollar AWS bills."
Ultimately,it doesn't matter, if the value it provides is greater than the AWS bill.
I am not sure I agree with that. Overpaying for something is still overpaying even if it provides value. Do you spend 100% of your salary on food? You will die if you don't eat. But somehow, the food required to keep you alive probably costs less than your salary.
There are two things worth considering. The BOA cloud is slow. That is to say, it is hard to procure machines to get your projects going. There is a lot of control on who will be paying for them. There is also A LOT of staff to manage it. So those 2 Billion could easily be tweaked downward when you consider the staff and lost of agility.
On the flip side, AWS is hella expensive. To do the things that they do it would cost A LOT of money. Maybe even more than they think. I have seen (and maybe a lot of people here also) small companies with million dollar AWS bills. So this number can also be tweaked up when you consider dozens of teams each having their way (at BOA scale) on the AWS console.