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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

#91

Post by jsmthrowaway »

jmathai wrote: post #90
Negitivefrags wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Bu…

ThePlanet was purchased by Softlayer, who was then purchased by IBM last summer. So they're now IBM.

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

#92

Post by erichocean »

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…

It's amazing how many things you don't need to think about when you only have a single box.

This. On the mobile app/social network thingy I'm working on now, I reduced it down to a single process. I've got one thing to watch, and on a single box, I expect—like you said—to scale to millions of users.

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

#93

Post by bildung »

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.

> I've found a medium instance (~$100/mo) handles with ease 100k+ visitors/mo without breaking a sweat.

This is not really intended as a direct reply to you, but I think that price point illustrates mgkimsals point well: I have a Django-based project with about the same amount of visitors per month on an old rented vserver that costs about 7€($10)/month. Yes, you have to set up nginx once, but as mgkimsal mentioned setting up your project for using AWS is not done without any work either. (And of course the load heavily depends on the type of project, so perhaps my visitors could mean only a fraction of the computational load of the ones in your example.)

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

#94

Post by [deleted] »

__david__ wrote: post #75
matwood wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, to all of that. Apparently you weren't around 15 years ago when startups pretty much had to do that if they wanted servers and an internet presence. I lived through a startup during that era and that exactly what we did. We had our fancy ISDN line and could server our web site to the world at a blistering 128K baud. We bought a $300 air conditioner from Home Depot, cut a whole in the server room door with a sawz…

[deleted]

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

#95

Post by vidarh »

rhizome wrote: post #36
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.

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

That may be true compared to doing your own racks, but not compared to renting managed servers at a monthly basis.

Every time I price out AWS vs alternatives, I end up with the same: If you need a server for more than about 8 hours a day, renting a managed server at a monthly basis tends to come out substantially cheaper. And that doesn't increase sysadmin workload; in fact many hosting providers now offers APIs for provisioning monthly billed services too, just generally with lead times in hours instead of minutes/seconds, so it takes really bursty traffic before taking the hassle of auto-scaling with cloud instances becomes worthwhile.

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

#96

Post by quicksilver03 »

beachstartup wrote: post #44

there are dozens, if not hundreds of smaller TRUE managed hosting providers popping up to service these kinds of accounts. that's what my startup does. we routinely steal large $5k-50k/month accounts from AWS and rackspace and softlayer (IBM) and the like. they just do a shitty job for an exorbitant price, plain and simple. folks... NOBODY gives a fuck about you at those companies, and you better believe it. not the…

I'm interested in knowing more since we do development and system integration for client in this kind of budget, and we didn't find a decent hosting provider in years of trying. Could you name some of those managed providers, including the one you work for?

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

#97

Post by askinner »

chrissnell wrote: post #89
askinner wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ru…

All good questions. The answer is pretty long winded. In short, we love our bare metal and you are not going to be able to rip it out of our cold dead hands. It is stable, fast and cost efficient.

Now for the long winded:

1. We do have a decent amount of spares but not a ton. Our contracts require replacement parts within hours to a day. Some items like F5 gear we have two and no spare. They just replace their gear in hours.

2. Each data center has 24/7 support that can do some minor tasks.

3. Yes, Networking is a pain and you need the right people to do it. It is not cheap either! Luckily our VP of Tech Ops is a networking guru.You mess up networking and you are hosed. Our first networking guy wasn't exactly Tops! So, we know first hand.

Having said all of that, for us there are economies of scale. It is the case if we want to test different machines, databases or any other combination at scale it could cost us several hundred thousand dollars just to run the tests. Yep, we have dropped over 100k for testing at scale. Its simply not sustainable and an irresponsible way to spend investors cash. Also, when you add in multiple environments for dev, test, staging and integration you can quickly see we consume a lot of boxes. So, many in fact, a lot of colocation/cloud services will not work with us unless we plop down large amounts of cash. Let's also factor in AWS wants large up front spend for reserved instances. Thus, if you need the capital to get the amount of compute you need to run your business it is not very hard just to call Dell, Cisco, Nimbix, Equinix or any other vendor and negotiate our own deals. If any of these companies can get half our spend a year they are willing to at least talk.

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

#98

Post by antirez »

While AWS can be a good solution depending on the needs and the costs/earnings ratio (for example there are companies netting tens of millions every year that have relatively limited computational requirements: if they spend 200k/year on EC2 is not the end of the world), I bet that part of its popularity is due to the following interesting feedback: at the end of the day, the sysops/devs picking EC2 are not paying for the bill. At the same time they are not going to be fired if the service is down, as "eveybody is down right now". This creates an environment where EC2 is not just a popular pick, but also praised by most, even when actually for the specific company needs other solutions could be way more cost effective or even provide a way better environment.

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

#100

Post by gcp »

mbrubeck wrote: post #13
abrowne wrote: post #7

Did anyone else think "Moz" was short for Mozilla?

I did at first, and I am a Mozilla engineer. Mozilla makes heavy use of AWS for running portions of our continuous integration system; the cost is significant: http://oduinn.com/blog/2013/12/13/the-financial-cost-of-a-ch...

It's pretty staggering that every checkin and try run costs 30 bucks.
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