Ask HN: Which cloud do you use, and why?

#1

Post by Nelkins » Thu, May 21, 2015, 2:39 PM UTC

Hey all,

The recent HN post on the "$10 super computer" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9575683) was actually very timely, as I am working at a client in the financial space who is evaluating various IaaS providers (up until now they have been using a small on-site data center). There is plenty information out there about which services are available, but less about why one should choose any particular provider over another. I'm curious to hear about the experiences of the HN community on this, and especially from those who have used several different services. What sealed the deal for you? Was it the price? Ecosystem of services? Ease of use? Was it the only thing available at the time? etc. Would also love to hear about any other factors one should take into account when making this kind of decision.

Re: Ask HN: Which cloud do you use, and why?

#2

Post by benologist » Thu, May 21, 2015, 2:51 PM UTC

Heroku for backend, automatically grow or shrink resources, nothing to maintain, nothing to configure and tons of services available alongside it.

Netlify for frontend, it is a static hosting service with some neat features like url rewriting that lets you proxy e.g. /api to a backend without revealing api keys and under the same origin / domain.

What really draws me to this is:

- no servers or software to maintain

- horizontal scaling by design (heroku kind of forces it)

- deploy process is "git push", fresh deploy is one click (heroku) and a few mins doing config on netlify though they have an api so maybe that's redundant

- no lock-in, easy to replicate locally

- databases are managed wrt backups, recovery etc

- entire front end is static and will scale indefinitely with massive uptime

https://heroku.com/ https://netlify.com/

Re: Ask HN: Which cloud do you use, and why?

#3

Post by vyrotek » Thu, May 21, 2015, 3:11 PM UTC

Microsoft Azure

- The admin portal is great

- Deploying to websites is just a simple push

- I can programmatically spin up new SQL DB instances

- I really like C#

- There are a LOT of additional services available

- Microsoft is very aggressive about keeping prices low

Re: Ask HN: Which cloud do you use, and why?

#4

Post by untog » Thu, May 21, 2015, 3:13 PM UTC

AWS, because we make a lot of use of S3 - last I looked there weren't any alternatives that truly rival it. Largely then end up using EC2 for cost (data transfer in-data centre) and billing simplicity.

Re: Ask HN: Which cloud do you use, and why?

#5

Post by geori » Thu, May 21, 2015, 3:14 PM UTC

Rackspace

- pricing and offerings are similar to AWS

- they answer the phone when you have problems

Re: Ask HN: Which cloud do you use, and why?

#6

Post by brianwawok » Thu, May 21, 2015, 3:22 PM UTC

Digital Ocean

- I only want to build off base Linux VM, I do not want to be locked into S3 + SQS + ...

- Price is right for young startups

- Speed is nice

Re: Ask HN: Which cloud do you use, and why?

#7

Post by thomasfoster96 » Thu, May 21, 2015, 3:24 PM UTC

I used to use Rackspace, but now I'm using AWS. Rackspace was nice, but AWS was a bit better on price (thought the two are priced slightly differently) and a secure setup was quicker on AWS than on Rackspace. I tend to use docs or forums to solve issues I have, so Rackspace's customer support wasn't all that useful compared to whatever Amazon offers.

Since then I've started using a few things like Elastic Beanstalk and continuous deployment, and getting them working on AWS was pretty pain free and easy. I don't think I could do as much on AWS now as I could on Rackspace.

Heroku looks nice but because of price I never tried it. Azure is also tempting to use, but as a non-customer their non-Windows offerings seem to be predictably second-rate.

Re: Ask HN: Which cloud do you use, and why?

#8

Post by thomasfoster96 » Thu, May 21, 2015, 3:26 PM UTC

thomasfoster96 wrote: post #7

I used to use Rackspace, but now I'm using AWS. Rackspace was nice, but AWS was a bit better on price (thought the two are priced slightly differently) and a secure setup was quicker on AWS than on Rackspace. I tend to use docs or forums to solve issues I have, so Rackspace's customer support wasn't all that useful compared to whatever Amazon offers. Since then I've started using a few things like Elastic Beanstalk a…

All of that said, IaaS is still way too complicated. I'm sure there's room for someone to come along and have an offering that's 10x simpler to manage and use.

Re: Ask HN: Which cloud do you use, and why?

#9

Post by akinder » Thu, May 21, 2015, 3:27 PM UTC

brianwawok wrote: post #6

Digital Ocean - I only want to build off base Linux VM, I do not want to be locked into S3 + SQS + ... - Price is right for young startups - Speed is nice

Digital Ocean here as well.

- The price is great, especially for running small apps, and its very easy to add more resources.

- Support is top notch

- Same as brianwawok, I like being able to build base Linux boxes and not be locked into vendor specific tech

Re: Ask HN: Which cloud do you use, and why?

#10

Post by slg » Thu, May 21, 2015, 3:31 PM UTC

vyrotek wrote: post #3

Microsoft Azure - The admin portal is great - Deploying to websites is just a simple push - I can programmatically spin up new SQL DB instances - I really like C# - There are a LOT of additional services available - Microsoft is very aggressive about keeping prices low

I think Azure gets a bad reputation in this community from the old "Microsoft = bad" bias that a lot of us have. However, if you are in a Windows stack and/or a corporate developer (and that is a large but quiet percentage of developers) it really seems like the best solution. Also the variety of services they provide under one umbrella is neck and neck with Amazon for best in the industry.