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

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

#31

Post by adrianpike »

apapli wrote: post #2

I'm curious about what is behind Moz's statement "The business impact is profound. We’re spending less and have improved reliability and efficiency." I don't have the experience with large AWS setups to comment about the cost implications, but improved reliability and efficiency strikes me as questionable - AWS's reliability has improved markedly over the last 18 months to the point I cannot remember when their last…

A big thing you fight with services like AWS is a lack of transparency - everything's very opaque, and so when you have something like an IO degradation on a given node, you've got very little to go off of, and you have to try and decipher if it's that you're seeing neighbor pressure on that node, if you're on degraded hardware, or if you're just abusing the hardware inappropriately.

Moving to your own hardware lets you actually reason about what's going on in a controlled environment, and at the scale that Moz is working at allows us to get hardware that's robust, well-supported, and reliable enough to have a pretty serious net positive overall.

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

#32

Post by iamchrisle »

justinsb wrote: post #3
apapli wrote: post #2

I'm curious about what is behind Moz's statement "The business impact is profound. We’re spending less and have improved reliability and efficiency." I don't have the experience with large AWS setups to comment about the cost implications, but improved reliability and efficiency strikes me as questionable - AWS's reliability has improved markedly over the last 18 months to the point I cannot remember when their last…

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.

Moz is an analytics startup for marketers. It essentially crawls the internet to create a graph of links and reports that in their user interface. They also calculate a score based on the authority of links similar but not the same as Google's Pagerank. They also do social tracking.

Technical details:

I don't know exactly how they do it but my guess is that they are I/O bound on the crawling side, then CPU bound on the parsing and processing side. I'm assuming they use different machines for those tasks.

On the crawling side, the index with 60-70 billion URLS was using 80 cc2.8xlarge machines with a backup on 200 c1.xlarge machines. (http://moz.com/blog/one-step-back-two-steps-forward)

(DISCLAIMER: I'm in the same industry. I am a developer with working for an indirect competitor. I know a few engineers and non-engineers who work at Moz.)

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

#33

Post by wahnfrieden »

fbags wrote: post #27
wahnfrieden wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't mean to claim otherwise, but I'd be interested to see what instances led to your observation.

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

#34

Post by AznHisoka »

iamchrisle wrote: post #32
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.

Moz is an analytics startup for marketers. It essentially crawls the internet to create a graph of links and reports that in their user interface. They also calculate a score based on the authority of links similar but not the same as Google's Pagerank. They also do social tracking. Technical details: I don't know exactly how they do it but my guess is that they are I/O bound on the crawling side, then CPU bound on t…

Rand replied that they don't use AWS for crawling.

I would imagine the main bottleneck, by far is the I/O with reading/writing to the database clusters and search index. Crawling is relatively cheap, it's storing that data that's hard.

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

#35

Post by fbags »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #33
fbags wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't mean to claim otherwise, but I'd be interested to see what instances led to your observation.

As a simple example, if you have a moderate number of hosts in a single security group (e.g. 200+ hosts), you can expect to have intermittent communication problems between the nodes. They used to deny this was a problem.

here's a source, since you're attacking and disbelieving everybody who doesn't love AWS: http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/2240203992/N...

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

#36

Post by rhizome »

jhartmann wrote: post #5

Public cloud is not for everyone. If you have a large number of machines that have to run all the time and are being taxed, then public cloud services do not make sense. If you are doing complex machine learning, large scale web crawling/scrapping, or generating large quantities of data (images/video/etc.) then services like AWS might not be a fit. They are incredibly awesome though for certain types of workload, but…

It's for people not making enough money (or not having the clue) to hire systems talent.

If you read the Moz report, they appear to have gotten a new CEO and are now building out a datacenter presence. They spent 7MM+/yr on AWS in 2013, there is no way that won't be viciously slashed by renting racks.

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

#37

Post by rhizome »

vosper wrote: post #26
wahnfrieden wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Support contracts are a form of backup.

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

#38

Post by nasalgoat »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #33
fbags wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't mean to claim otherwise, but I'd be interested to see what instances led to your observation.

I suggest trying to asking for help with network problems. One of my admins spent a month going back and forth only to be told "nothing to be done, it's fine."

It really is truly terrible support.

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

#39

Post by ceejayoz »

rhizome wrote: post #37
vosper wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Support contracts are a form of backup.

Except with AWS you can start a support contract in about a minute, via the website, and turn it off after a week when you're done.

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

#40

Post by erichate »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #17

Not surprised to see this, although I am surprised more companies aren't following suit. We abandoned AWS a year and a half ago and cut our server / infrastructure costs by 90% in the process.

Yes, more specifics would be nice.
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