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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

#2

Post by apapli »

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 major outage was.

I'm keen to hear other peoples' thoughts on this..

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

#3

Post by justinsb »

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.

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

#5

Post by jhartmann »

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 for others it is a very expensive option that isn't economical.

Personally I think the best is some mix of both public and private, so you have the scalability when you really spike but have cheaper more capable machines handling baseline and things like analysis or storage workloads.

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

#6

Post by res0nat0r »

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.

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.

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

#10

Post by ecaron »

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 default blocks for all accesses from AWS services, the Moz exit was inevitable.

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