I used to work for BofA as a quant in their Charlotte HQ. Their cloud decision is the least surprising. You really have to see it from their pov. My boss used to say - "Charlotte is a 2-horse town. You either work for Bank of America, or you walk across the street to Wells Fargo"!
Compared to these 2, the other companies are much smaller along most axes (market cap,employee count, or just sheer heft). There's an uptown walkway( like a private overhead glass tunnel) that safely escort bank workers from downtown to bank without coming into contact with riffraff :) Its just a whole new level of planned design. Imagine if all the FAANGs had an interconnected private glass tunnel walkway that looked down upon the unfortunate denizens of MV/PA/SF,while the chosen ones swiftly segwayed from FAANG to FAANG whilst checking in their latest git commit into kubernetes or whatever it is you guys do :) That's what it was like. Quite unreal.
But all this clout leads to a rather head in sand mindset on most strategic items, like technology choice, programming language choice, cloud choice (or non-choice in this case), version control choice etc. Everything was done in-house, in the most boring safest way possible tech ( mostly Java about 3 versions behind, some strange python lib where any function call was automatically logged!, and Excel & Matlab all over the quant land. I mostly sftp-ed financial data from some Quartz cloud...felt very quaint to do these sort of things in 201X. All laptops were locked down windows dell boxes on which you couldn't install anything, & ran some strange norton antivirus which hogged all the memory. My interview itself was so old fashioned. I thought since it was a Quant job, I'd get questions on math & finance. They trotted out their "chief developer" who wanted to know how to model a chair with 4 legs using Java OO. You know the 1990s Grady Booch garbage full of UML, with parent Table class & child Table & Leg Class & friend function & all that jazz. I was like Jesus this regressive inheritance based OO shit is still alive! Its a deeply old fashioned slow moving place. Very large IT budget with pretty much half of Charlotte working in some capacity for the bank. So yeah, if you had all the personnel & all the money, why wouldn't you build your own cloud. You are paying for all these people anyway, might as well give them something to do. Of all the employers I've worked for in my lifetime, this was the one place where I was personally asked NOT to work so hard, because I stayed at my desk after 5:30 pm.
(Sorry I have a regular 4 digit HN account but the bank doesn't like it if you talk about them. One of their lawyers once tracked me down because I mentioned some harmless datapoint about a technical problem I had worked on.)
But all this clout leads to a rather head in sand mindset on most strategic items, like technology choice, programming language choice, cloud choice (or non-choice in this case), version control choice etc. Everything was done in-house, in the most boring safest way possible tech ( mostly Java about 3 versions behind, some strange python lib where any function call was automatically logged!, and Excel & Matlab all over the quant land. I mostly sftp-ed financial data from some Quartz cloud...felt very quaint to do these sort of things in 201X. All laptops were locked down windows dell boxes on which you couldn't install anything, & ran some strange norton antivirus which hogged all the memory. My interview itself was so old fashioned. I thought since it was a Quant job, I'd get questions on math & finance. They trotted out their "chief developer" who wanted to know how to model a chair with 4 legs using Java OO. You know the 1990s Grady Booch garbage full of UML, with parent Table class & child Table & Leg Class & friend function & all that jazz. I was like Jesus this regressive inheritance based OO shit is still alive! Its a deeply old fashioned slow moving place. Very large IT budget with pretty much half of Charlotte working in some capacity for the bank. So yeah, if you had all the personnel & all the money, why wouldn't you build your own cloud. You are paying for all these people anyway, might as well give them something to do. Of all the employers I've worked for in my lifetime, this was the one place where I was personally asked NOT to work so hard, because I stayed at my desk after 5:30 pm.
(Sorry I have a regular 4 digit HN account but the bank doesn't like it if you talk about them. One of their lawyers once tracked me down because I mentioned some harmless datapoint about a technical problem I had worked on.)