Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by bigiain » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 4:49 AM UTC

bane wrote: post #58

At some point, I'm going to guess that even moderately large AWS configurations would be better off getting a high capacity business FiOS line (or whatever the next tier is), get a couple racks full of home rolled high-end systems and staff 2 or 3 guys full time to run everything. The systems will be faster, probably about as reliable, everything will be cheaper even with extra people on payroll. I'd love to see some…

Me too. I suspect there's medium and longterm costs that probably skew my "gut feel" of how much cheaper that'd be. I wonder what the real costs associated with feeding a roomful of local servers replacement disks/ram/powersupplies are, and what a realistic replacement schedule for the hardware is?

Sure AWS is expensive for 24/7/365 applications, but I suspect there's some "in between ground" where Amazon's economies of scale make it less expensive to just pay them to deal with owning and maintaining the hardware (and ensuring you write your applications to be able to deal with cloud instances vanishing underneath you randomly).

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

#62

Post by diziet » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 4:54 AM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #42

For what many orgs need to do, a myriad of lesser-known VPS providers would be just fine, and be a fraction of the cost. But most people I've known don't investigate or educate themselves much - it's been a herd mentality towards AWS, irrespective of needs or costs (because often, it's not them paying - it's "the company"). Perhaps as a freelance consultant right now I take a sharper look at the costs involved - if a…

Well -- when you are spending 6+ million a year on AWS, a smaller VPS provider might not work out because of scale.

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

#63

Post by dsl » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 5:05 AM UTC

fbags wrote: post #35

wahnfrieden wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It may or may not be the same issue, but from what I have been able to gather a modification of a security group is basically a "delete, recreate, repopulate" operation. All of our intermittent network issues could be reasonably tied back to SG modifications.

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

#64

Post by briancurtin » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 5:07 AM UTC

ecaron wrote: post #10

I bet one of the leading factors is the number of sites blocking the AWS servers. As a scraping service, the fact that Amazon makes all their public IPs known ( https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=1701 ) is really inconvenient for anyone "crawling" the web. Rackspace also makes their list available, albeit incomplete ( http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/cloud-site... ). As more websites setup…

> Rackspace also makes their list available, albeit incomplete (http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/cloud-site...).

FWIW, this is specific to Cloud Sites, which is like one-click Wordpress/Drupal deployments.

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

#65

Post by matwood » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 5:31 AM UTC

bane wrote: post #58

At some point, I'm going to guess that even moderately large AWS configurations would be better off getting a high capacity business FiOS line (or whatever the next tier is), get a couple racks full of home rolled high-end systems and staff 2 or 3 guys full time to run everything. The systems will be faster, probably about as reliable, everything will be cheaper even with extra people on payroll. I'd love to see some…

Where do you just throw a couple racks of computers? Closet? Sounds great, now let's deal with cooling them and the maintenance around that. Then there is power. You think your standard office had all the necessary circuits to drive a couple racks full of servers?

There is so much more to running a server farm than just buying a couple racks of computers and upgrading the FiOS line.

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

#66

Post by waps » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 5:32 AM UTC

d23 wrote: post #52

mgkimsal wrote: post #42

For what many orgs need to do, a myriad of lesser-known VPS providers would be just fine, and be a fraction of the cost. But most people I've known don't investigate or educate themselves much - it's been a herd mentality towards AWS, irrespective of needs or costs (because often, it's not them paying - it's "the company"). Perhaps as a freelance consultant right now I take a sharper look at the costs involved - if a…

> if a client has, say, $50k to budget on a project, I really don't want $10k of that to go to hosting if it doesn't need to On a $50k project, how are you even dropping $10k on AWS? I've found a medium instance (~$100/mo) handles with ease 100k+ visitors/mo without breaking a sweat.

Then there's the AWS massive disadvantage in data traffic cost. Small VPS providers (or large ones for that matter) typically include 4-5 Tb of data, and their compute is no more expensive (or cheaper) than amazon. And half the customers want large pngs (because jpg at 2% "reduces quality"). I'd say only to people with 45" monitors at 5cm to their screen or less. It also produces 50% data savings.

That's the biggest mistake one can make : host a traffic intensive app (even lots of graphics) on AWS.

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

#67

Post by programminggeek » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 5:33 AM UTC

What I find most perplexing is that people don't really understand that the point of Amazon is elasticity to make capacity planning easier for high growth situations.

That elasticity only makes financial sense when you use it properly. Like, if you keep your entire infrastructure turned on all the time, and cranked up to 11, but you aren't using reserved instances, then you are missing the point and you might as well just build/rent your own datacenter space and run your own servers (or pay someone like Rackspace to do it).

If you are using AWS, then you need to make use of reserved instances and the elasticity to spin down things that are being underutilized. If your infrastructure is too fragile to safely handle spinning up and down instances, then you probably are missing the cloud or aren't taking full advantage of what it has to offer.

I'm not saying Moz wasn't doing all of these things, I'm just saying that if you are spending $7 million a year, but aren't doing the appropriate capacity planning, then you are making a mistake.

At the very least, the exercise of doing real capacity planning by moving into physical data centers probably had a lot to do with the cost savings as well.

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

#68

Post by Xorlev » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 5:33 AM UTC

bane wrote: post #58

At some point, I'm going to guess that even moderately large AWS configurations would be better off getting a high capacity business FiOS line (or whatever the next tier is), get a couple racks full of home rolled high-end systems and staff 2 or 3 guys full time to run everything. The systems will be faster, probably about as reliable, everything will be cheaper even with extra people on payroll. I'd love to see some…

I sincerely hope you never deploy a system then. Not trying to attack you, but I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea. Deploying servers is not as easy as you make it out to be. If you have the dough to hire 2-3 people to run your servers, you can afford to do it right.

I would never roll with a FiOS line to run my services, for one I doubt their TOS supports it. I'm not sure anything but the smallest of startups could pull that off, and even then they'd be better served spinning up a few droplets on DO.

If you have a 'moderately large' AWS configuration, you need a corresponding 'moderately large' DC deployment with plans for redundant network links and redundant power. I can't express the importance of that: anything you run that you care about needs to be in a controlled, monitored environment. Not a home-rolled franken-rack powered by a single non-symmetric line without an SLA. Not to mention proper fire suppression.

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

#69

Post by rgrieselhuber » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 5:36 AM UTC

wahnfrieden wrote: post #19

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.

Care to share more details? Which services were you using? Most everything reserved? Were you taking advantage of auto scaling / was your traffic very elastic? Do you have as much redundancy in your new host / do you have redundancy requirements?

We were using EC2 and RDS (we still use S3 quite a bit).

Nothing reserved because we never wanted to be tied to the platform for long, although we ended up staying on longer than I wanted to due to difficulties in migrating away.

Yes, I realize we could have saved a lot with longer contracts. But the costs would still have been much higher than what we're paying now.

RDS crashed (completely) for us 2 years in a row, on exactly July 4th. We never got a straight answer from Amazon and their support system is a nightmare. Performance was always an issue.

Our main servers are now hosted on Hetzner (surprisingly).

We've had issues here and there with individual machine performance but nothing catastrophic and their customer service has been good.

For redundancy, we replicate back to the US onto Rackspace (and small EC2 instances for additional redundancy) servers and can switch over completely if need be.

We were worried that latency (because servers are in Germany) would be an issue but it hasn't. Also, in addition to US customers, we have a lot of customers in Japan so it doesn't seem to make much difference.

It's probably not for everybody and it's certainly not "cool" but it's worked very well for us.

Edit: our needs are relatively inelastic, which obviously makes AWS a poor choice to begin with. That was something we learned a little later in life as a startup.

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

#70

Post by askinner » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 5:38 AM UTC

bigiain wrote: post #59

askinner wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! 95% of our services were running at AWS. Paying AWS for running our website is not a good use of money. Many cheaper ways to host a website. Paying for 70-100 hours of compute and having the server crash in the middle of calculating your predictive analytics not exactly all that bright either. So, we bought our own gear. AWS works and worked with us pretty damn closely as we pulled apps out of the cloud.

I'm curious to know if you considered other hosting providers as an alternative to building out your own hardware/datacenters? I think it's reasonably well known that AWS is around 3 times more expensive than alternatives where you pay by-the-month instead of by-the-minute. Was a Rackspace/Linode/whoever implementation costed against a buy-your-own-boxes solution, and if so, is there anything you could share about wh…

We use other cloud services as well. Rackspace and Nimbix are a couple of them. We even looked at Azure figuring no contention for boxes but we don't have any MSFT in our stack (sorry to my whole neighborhood of MSFT employees). We never depend on just one and have a detailed cost breakdown before we decided to buy or move a service. The ROI needs to be there.

As an aside, AWS has everyone beat when it comes to regions however. We can be close to our customers in Europe, US and so on.

To date, no one is spinning up cloud fronts and services in more areas than AWS. It will take the MSFT , IBMs and the like to move the global cloud along. MSFT just needs to realize not everyone wants Sharepoint, SQLServer and .net.

Which service you use is really situational. Plenty of good ones out there. AWS is just one!