<story><title>FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes</title><url>https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/fedex-to-close-data-centers-retire-all-mainframes-by-2024-saving-400m/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>whatever1</author><text>The cost does not scale linearly with the #of packages. A table with 1 entry is not cheaper than a table with 1 million entries.&lt;p&gt;The same routing algorithms have to run either they have one package or 1 million packages.&lt;p&gt;Plus you need to keep the history of the operations for months if not years (meaning that you will store both holiday and random Tuesday data anyway).&lt;p&gt;So where is this flexible cost exactly?</text></item><item><author>sofixa</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not only about size, there&amp;#x27;s also workloads to take into consideration.&lt;p&gt;Take FedEx, their operations are highly dynamic - per day but also per period. The number of packages sent, and being transported, vary greatly between a random Tuesday 15:00 and the weeks before holidays.&lt;p&gt;In such a scenario, with your own infrastructure, you need to overprovision, by a lot, to be able to handle the heaviest load possible, and then some margin on top. And that capacity is wasted what, 90% of the year?&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile if you subcontract that part on AWS, it&amp;#x27;s their problem, and they can afford to handle it, and you only pay for what you actually use when you use it.</text></item><item><author>hnarn</author><text>Making accurate calculations of data center cost is of course complicated and rarely manages to take everything into account, but the common knowledge I’ve heard is that there comes a point when a company is so large that going on-prem is what actually saves them a lot of money.&lt;p&gt;If FedEx is not large enough to be one of those companies, how large do you actually have to be? Or has cloud pricing changed to the point where this is no longer true, and even huge corporations can save money in moving away from their own premises?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>magicalhippo</author><text>Not just routing. When a plane or truck arrives and is unloaded, thousands of packages have to be scanned, which triggers a cascade of messages to different systems. In addition to the routing and whatnot, customs declarations might have to be sent, track and trace gets updates (both from arrival scan and customs), there&amp;#x27;s billing etc. All this flurry of activity happens within an hour or so after the plane lands, and then it quiets down until the next plane or truck.&lt;p&gt;I could easily see FedEx can save money by dynamically scaling capacity to track the arrival of their planes or trucks.</text></comment>
<story><title>FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes</title><url>https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/fedex-to-close-data-centers-retire-all-mainframes-by-2024-saving-400m/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>whatever1</author><text>The cost does not scale linearly with the #of packages. A table with 1 entry is not cheaper than a table with 1 million entries.&lt;p&gt;The same routing algorithms have to run either they have one package or 1 million packages.&lt;p&gt;Plus you need to keep the history of the operations for months if not years (meaning that you will store both holiday and random Tuesday data anyway).&lt;p&gt;So where is this flexible cost exactly?</text></item><item><author>sofixa</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not only about size, there&amp;#x27;s also workloads to take into consideration.&lt;p&gt;Take FedEx, their operations are highly dynamic - per day but also per period. The number of packages sent, and being transported, vary greatly between a random Tuesday 15:00 and the weeks before holidays.&lt;p&gt;In such a scenario, with your own infrastructure, you need to overprovision, by a lot, to be able to handle the heaviest load possible, and then some margin on top. And that capacity is wasted what, 90% of the year?&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile if you subcontract that part on AWS, it&amp;#x27;s their problem, and they can afford to handle it, and you only pay for what you actually use when you use it.</text></item><item><author>hnarn</author><text>Making accurate calculations of data center cost is of course complicated and rarely manages to take everything into account, but the common knowledge I’ve heard is that there comes a point when a company is so large that going on-prem is what actually saves them a lot of money.&lt;p&gt;If FedEx is not large enough to be one of those companies, how large do you actually have to be? Or has cloud pricing changed to the point where this is no longer true, and even huge corporations can save money in moving away from their own premises?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mrep</author><text>Ever heard of the traveling salesman problem because that is worse than linear, it is factorial.  Granted, that is probably overkill for most people and my team (Not FedEx) just does NxN so it is only quadratic but it is definitely not constant nor even linear.</text></comment>