Management listened to the siren call of "it's easier and cheaper".
Now they still have to pay for the same senior sysadmins they were told they wouldn't need anymore, but, with the added bonus of paying 10-1000x for bandwidth over what they could get if they had stayed on-prem.
Doubt sincerly any exec or manager ever belived the easier and cheaper motto !
In opposition to what has been said in this thread their IT teams are very good and have raised (in vain) warnings against GCP since the beginning.
The official motivations for the GCP move as given to us, plebs (already mentionned in other comms) :
- Financial move from CAPEX model (hosting own DC) to OPEX.
- Transfer of responsability in case of fail; you can charge ($$$) GCP for downtime, could't really do that on your own teams.
- Focus on business value and not on IT.
(IMHO all of them are wrong, beginnig with the last one : you design & assemble planes on computers; IT is obviously part of your core business model, even a strategic one !).
And about the why GCP vs a french local actor the answer was because of tech maturity.
The 'easy and cheaper' is tech propaganda, this never was part of debate simply because it's false and we all know it, even the high execs in their ivory tower.
Same thing as AI : haven't seen any big EU firm lay off big chunk of people to replace them with IA whereas in the US all the big ones already fired AND got the people back; US believes in it's own propaganda, EU doesn't ! Noone here thought we could fire sysadmins by moving services to CSPs, that always seemed like fake ad and reality is here to prove us right !
> Why did Airbus go to "the cloud" in the first place?
The same reason that so many companies went to "the cloud", because the hyperscalers warpped the C-suite round their little finger.
There are two things any C-suite like doing that the hyperscalers could help them tick boxes on.
First, shifting capex to opex. They love doing that because of the accounting treatment. Opex goes into your P&L, so it reduces your taxable profit and therefore it reduces your tax bill. Meanwhile capex goes onto the balance sheet and is deprecated over the asset's life, so the "only" benefit you might get is to claim allowances (e.g. R&D) from your tax authority.
Second, it allows lots of things to be made "someone else's problem". Security ? Their problem. Staff ? Their problem. Tick-boxes to keep the compliance department happy ? Their problem.
So the hyperscalers can turn up and spin a ready-made story that the C-suite will lap up. Perhaps accompanied by a nice lunch and a round of golf. ;)
There is no doubt, companies such as Airbus have the technical competence and the financial means to do it all in-house. Sadly the C-suite calls the shots ....
Everyone went to "the cloud" because they want to make their IT problems someone else's problem. It's no different from the previous era of MSPs, except that there are now only, like, five MSPs in the world.
Note: I mean the Google Docs and Microsoft 365 type of cloud not the AWS and Azure type of cloud
A symptom of the larger problem to want to divest and outsource everything not considered a "core competence". Hence the outsourcing of everything from housekeeping to IT
My take is it's actually because of poor performance of internal teams.
With a cloud provider, you can get an account by filling out a sign-up page and handing over a credit card. Internal teams will often hide behind Bureaucracy and a ticket system, with processes that make hosting a simple web app take multiple quarters.
Now there are layered reasons for that, some of them with legitimate basis, but at the end of the day they're usually low skilled teams click-ops-ing some VMWware, delivering a terrible service.
We were contemplating just this as a lunch time conversation among few engineers. Why can’t we have a sort of internal currency in the company and let teams use it as their “budget” to get things done?
Infra team’s budget is broken up by the “user teams’ budgets + markup. Think your team needs a rlasticsearch cluster of your own versus the “managed” one by the infra team’s? Spend your budget accordingly. Want an increased budget? Get your director to pay from his currency budget.. all the way to the top..
Internal hosting teams ( cloud or on-prem ) should work more like public hosting environments and should focus on:
- Segregating workloads. If amazon can host a hacked service on their hosting stack without every tenant immediately being compromised, you can too.
- Self-Service. Teams should be able to just get accounts and do stuff without asking anyone.
- Building assurance. Now you've made it easy for teams to do small things, you're more likely to get more users and have less shadow-IT. You can now try and build organizational assurance without making teams suffer.
A team just needs petty cash and a cost code for a small amount of space in dev land.
What everyone does instead if ask for the planning to be done and completed upfront, which isn't realistic for a team you just stood up trying to do UR and a POC.
Reality of AWS or Azure in Europe :
- Can't provision new ressources without calling them
- If you get defects, you might be with Azure Europe Head after weeks of escalation and the only thing he wants to hear is if Microsoft can do a success story with you
- Gaslighting you on issues
I agree with you, we went from terrible service, to terrible service with no leverage.
More adequate question would be why did Airbus go GCP instead of pushing a local french actor like OVH, Clever or Scale, decison that seemed right all along and that is eventually in place ? The answer is because of the bribe ex-CEO took !
And about espionage there's not much to spy on : no new plane ongoing, no fancy tech detained by Airbus, all the tech is the suppliers, Airbus is only an assembler. To prove my point see chinese aviation : it's been 20years we litteraly gave them the A320 and they are still far from producing anything of their own, they barely managed to have that copy called Comac flying !
... is this a reverse Dropbox comment? Everyone up to COVID was treating companies not moving some infra to AWS like how hardware companies would be treated without a mockup humanoid to show around.
Now they still have to pay for the same senior sysadmins they were told they wouldn't need anymore, but, with the added bonus of paying 10-1000x for bandwidth over what they could get if they had stayed on-prem.