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Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

xconomy.com

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Re: Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

#21

Post by AznHisoka »

corresation wrote: post #18
res0nat0r wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like they are more at a size that makes sense to have an on site setup vs. a cloud based one. The cloud market is maturing now and a hybrid private/public model I think is going to become more of the norm, for companies that are large enough that this makes sense. It is cheaper to run your own hardware when you are big enough, and then use AWS for failover / load spikes / cool tech, etc.

The scale where doing your own thing makes financial sense can be much lower than many think. About two thousand dollars a month gets half a rack with a high-speed, highly-reliable connection in co-location. The lease payments on several extremely high performance, flash storage rack servers would be a couple thousand dollars a month. Throw on some shared nothing redundant virtualization, and you have the equivalent…

I own 15 OVH servers (32 GB RAM, 2 TB HD, quad-core), and the cost monthly is less than $1000. What can that buy more in Amazon? Maybe a huge instance? But I surely can't run thousands of distributed crawlers and store a distributed search index.

Re: Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

#22

Post by wahnfrieden »

vosper wrote: post #16

My employer spends a small fortune with AWS, and we make use of many of the services. There's no way our small team could have built our product on any other platform. Still, as my colleague observed, it must be the only business in the world you can spend $1m a year on and get only basic support, with web-only tickets that take hours or days to get a resolved.

Why aren't you spending even the $50 support tier if not enough for one of the higher tiers if you're dropping that much in usage costs? I don't understand why anyone expects free support when every little thing in AWS is charged for as a utility.

Re: Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

#23

Post by gesman »

Cloud premise is an ability to fire expensive sysadmins and let cloud babysit your needs. Amazon was the first in the world to create the cloud but it's still a bare-metal cloud today. "Lacking service" ? Of course - they didn't promise any service whatsoever to begin with.

In other words you pay more to use Amazon cloud + you still have to hire and pay sysadmins to babysit the whole pile of Amazon cloud mess.

That's what MSFT is perfectly positioned to solve with Azure + their excellent set of mature tools and services.

MSFT came late to the cloud game (as Ballmer was mostly doing in all other games for the last 10 yrs) - but they are getting this enterprise play right step by step.

Re: Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

#24

Post by dangrossman »

bradleyjg wrote: post #12
dangrossman wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not I, but I'm part of their demographic -- http://d2v4zi8pl64nxt.cloudfront.net/2013-in-review/52e9b643...

Weird. I recognize only half the companies on that chart, and I'm not sure what Adobe or salesforce have to with marketing.

> I'm not sure what Adobe or salesforce have to do with marketing

They're some of the largest players in marketing and analytics, especially since Adobe's $1.8B acquisition of Omniture in '09.

http://www.adobe.com/solutions/digital-marketing.html

http://www.salesforce.com/marketing-cloud/overview/

Re: Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

#25

Post by gtaylor »

AznHisoka wrote: post #21
corresation wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scale where doing your own thing makes financial sense can be much lower than many think. About two thousand dollars a month gets half a rack with a high-speed, highly-reliable connection in co-location. The lease payments on several extremely high performance, flash storage rack servers would be a couple thousand dollars a month. Throw on some shared nothing redundant virtualization, and you have the equivalent…

I own 15 OVH servers (32 GB RAM, 2 TB HD, quad-core), and the cost monthly is less than $1000. What can that buy more in Amazon? Maybe a huge instance? But I surely can't run thousands of distributed crawlers and store a distributed search index.

You can get some decent beef with the new C3 instances, but you have to pay a good chunk of the year upfront (called a reservation) to get the sane rates. If you do that, the prices are OK.

But you don't come to AWS just for EC2 instances. You're there to combine their portfolio of services in various ways. Because of this, it'd probably be wrong to just compare $1000 on AWS vs what you are paying now.

Re: Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

#26

Post by vosper »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #22
vosper wrote: post #16

My employer spends a small fortune with AWS, and we make use of many of the services. There's no way our small team could have built our product on any other platform. Still, as my colleague observed, it must be the only business in the world you can spend $1m a year on and get only basic support, with web-only tickets that take hours or days to get a resolved.

Why aren't you spending even the $50 support tier if not enough for one of the higher tiers if you're dropping that much in usage costs? I don't understand why anyone expects free support when every little thing in AWS is charged for as a utility.

Sorry, I didn't phrase that well - it wasn't really supposed to be a criticism of AWS, but rather (what I thought to be) an interesting observation about how their model differs from most services.

To be fair to AWS we don't need support often; we really only have problems when everyone else does (major outages) and we can follow the status of that online, we don't need to call someone to be told "we're working on it". Also our account manager is responsive and pro-active in helping us out, and they've put us on free Business Support trials a couple of times, but because we need it so infrequently there's really no reason for us to fork out for it.

Re: Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

#27

Post by fbags »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #22
vosper wrote: post #16

My employer spends a small fortune with AWS, and we make use of many of the services. There's no way our small team could have built our product on any other platform. Still, as my colleague observed, it must be the only business in the world you can spend $1m a year on and get only basic support, with web-only tickets that take hours or days to get a resolved.

Why aren't you spending even the $50 support tier if not enough for one of the higher tiers if you're dropping that much in usage costs? I don't understand why anyone expects free support when every little thing in AWS is charged for as a utility.

The paid support tier is also atrocious and close to useless. AWS routinely denies the existence of major flaws for months or years, until they eventually admit it, often by just documenting it instead of fixing it.

They're horrifically expensive, and low quality.

It's really, really sad that so many startups have been convinced that it's "cheap" when it's almost comically expensive and lousy.

Re: Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

#28

Post by [deleted] »

icedchai wrote: post #15
bradleyjg wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird. I recognize only half the companies on that chart, and I'm not sure what Adobe or salesforce have to with marketing.

so you're telling us you don't know what content creation or CRM has to do with marketing?

[deleted]

Re: Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

#29

Post by [deleted] »

res0nat0r wrote: post #6
justinsb wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There may not have been a recent total outage of the kind that hits the news, but I would bet Moz are referring to degraded service (slow CPU/disk/network) that causes their application to fail (or their error rate to rise). I'm not very familiar with Moz, but it looks like they have an analytics product, which is probably particularly sensitive to slowdowns.

Sounds like they are more at a size that makes sense to have an on site setup vs. a cloud based one. The cloud market is maturing now and a hybrid private/public model I think is going to become more of the norm, for companies that are large enough that this makes sense. It is cheaper to run your own hardware when you are big enough, and then use AWS for failover / load spikes / cool tech, etc.

[deleted]
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