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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

#81

Post by marcusr »

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…

There's always a compelling case for that until your line breaks or your power fails. I've seen data centres fail too, but they do have some redundancy for their systems, more than you could reasonably spec for your own premises.

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

#84

Post by mattspitz »

jl6 wrote: post #83

Their m1.small is still a pretty good deal if you're in need of root access to an OS image, and your capacity needs are very small. Anyone aware of anything comparable?

DigitalOcean is fabulous. It's very nice hardware and not very expensive. No AWS services, but if all you need is root access to an OS image, I can't recommend it enough.

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

#85

Post by nodata »

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…

The clue is in your answer: you didn't name a single alternative.

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

#86

Post by superuser2 »

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…

A real datacenter is almost certainly Better Than You at reliability. Consider:

- Redundant fiber connections to multiple independent ISPs

- Battery backup and generator failover

- Redundant HVAC

- Waterless fire suppression

- 24x7 staff presence

- Security systems and personnel

These are all economies of scale. If you're just running a couple of racks you're either throwing away money by paying for all this or making yourself irresponsibly vulnerable to things that can and will go wrong.

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

#87

Post by theknown99 »

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.

Bad language/platform/library choices. People go for what's hip rather than what's efficient.

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

#88

Post by chrissnell »

programminggeek wrote: post #67

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…

What you're saying may apply to simple SaaS companies who might build a two-tier application that can be easily scaled up and down by adding front-end nodes and r/o database nodes, but it doesn't always apply to data analysis companies like Moz, who may use large ElasticSearch clusters that don't autoscale. I run technical operations for such a company. The vast majority of our infrastructure remains static, simply because the underlying technologies don't allow for autoscale. The best place for a company like ours is in a private cloud, be it at Rackspace, SoftLayer, or in colocation.

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

#89

Post by chrissnell »

askinner wrote: post #70
bigiain wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 regio…

I'm very curious about your ROI analysis for colo vs. a service like Rackspace's "Managed Colocation" [1] where a hosting provider runs the DC and provides the hardware and your folks manage the OS layer and up.

I run technical operations for a company with a fraction of your footprint (but growing quickly). We're at the point where we are growing out of the RAX public cloud but by my calculations, the decision to run our own private cloud in colocation vs. lease one from a service provider is (financially) a wash.

From a practicality standpoint, the scales tip towards leasing bare metal from a provider. I'm curious to hear your experiences with colo. How many folks do you have working in your colocation facilities doing hardware maintenance? What about network engineering? I presume you also keep a sizable stock of spares?

1: http://www.rackspace.com/managed_hosting/managed_colocation/

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

#90

Post by jmathai »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #73
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…

What bugs me most is the false dichotomy I get when I talk about this with friends; their choice is presented as either use AWS or "hire a full-time sysadmin, buy multiple server-grade boxes and manage all this in a rented data center". I've been told Amazon is saving people "easily" $100k/year by not having to hire staff and buy expensive hardware. This absolutely hits the nail on the head. The dumb part is that the…

I've done both. In my previous startup (circa 2005) we started at The Planet (are they still around?) and within 18 months we were colocating physical servers at a nearby Level 3.

I'm sure it's gotten better but when we colocated I had to project what type of traffic and storage (photos) we'd need. That led us to lease a few servers from HP. We were able to reuse hardware we owned already for reporting type tasks. But I got 1TB storage servers when we were using about 1/5 of that.

In my current startup (photos, again) we were on AWS from the beginning. I think we could save money now if we wanted. But when we first started out all we needed were 2 micro instances and S3.

I'd say we've increased capacity by 8x since then.

But here's the kicker. Since we started on AWS we were able to keep our costs fairly low at the beginning and as we grew we never had to make any long term projections. We simply added capacity (literally) on a weekly basis.

Once you start to buy into the AWS ecosystem you begin to reap some serious benefits. You simply cannot think of AWS as just EC2 instances. Of course, the trade-off by going all in is some level of lock-in (though this can easily be minimized).

Having done both I am happy to pay AWS more for the ecosystem.

--

We're using EC2, ELB, SNS, ElasticTranscoder, RDS, S3, Route53, CloudSearch, CloudFront & Glacier.

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