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.
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.
Right, and that makes total sense. I haven't ran the numbers, but I know that if you have some amount of fixed capacity required, you would absolutely want to do reserved instances on all of those and consolidate as much as you can where it makes sense.
However, if the numbers don't work out on reserved instances and you have a pretty steady demand, going with your own infrastructure makes total sense.
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.