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Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

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Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#161

Post by jsingleton »

CaptSpify wrote: post #151
jsingleton wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Colo is certainly a cheap way to do things for a steady load, and you get great performance for the money, but who wants to get paged at 4am? I know HN and StackOverflow do things this way but I don't even want to manage the OS these days. We used to host our servers on-site and it was a massive pain. At least with colo you don't need to personally worry about power or internet going down, but you still need to repla…

Curious as to why you think aws means you won't get paged at 4-am? If you have a redundant setup, you won't get paged as everything can just fail-over.

If you set things up badly then you can certainly get paged when on AWS. If you set things up correctly (multiple AZs / regions and auto scaling etc.) then it's much less likely. There could of course be software issues but hardware is no longer your problem and you can let experts do it for you.

Yes, you could do this yourself but that would cost more and reduce the advantage. How many colo racks in how many data centres / countries do want to have to visit? Even with redundant hot spare fail-over you will need to fix the hardware at some point and will be running at risk until you do.

A hybrid approach can work, with colo for the base load and cloud for scaling spikes / redundancy.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#162

Post by bpicolo »

boulos wrote: post #153
bpicolo wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing stopping me from using Google Cloud atm is hosted Postgres.

Would you be willing to talk to one of our Product Managers about what you need in a hosted Postgres to come over? ;). Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Hah, my requirements are very minimal right now. I would say that in the greater context that one of the important things for people using postgres would be plugin support for e.g. postgis and logical replication(which is not a builtin for postgres https://2ndquadrant.com/en/resources/pglogical/).

Never having to worry about vacuuming manually would be pretty sweet, and having some level of access to the host to install e.g. vividcortex would be nice.

Not having to worry about pgbouncer would also be nice (though that means postgres pooling on your web hosts, sort of separate from the hosted postgres bit).

Also, I suppose obvious warnings when I'm near IO or storage limits would be swell

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#163

Post by bpicolo »

lobo_tuerto wrote: post #149
bpicolo wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing stopping me from using Google Cloud atm is hosted Postgres.

What about this? https://cloud.google.com/solutions/set-up-postgres

I know how to run it myself, it's just easier to not. I prefer the set-and-forget solution for smaller projects.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#164

Post by boulos »

ssalat wrote: post #71

Good question! AWS is currently getting a mess for us. We're facing an auto scaling spot instance bug (it's definitely one) and we're trying since 3 days to contact anybody from them to get our business back on to the road! We're now forced to sign-up for a paid support plan. Nevertheless, they already breached the SLA of 12 hours, it's really frustrating... First thought after 5 years of paying them a lot of money t…

Just FYI, we recently lowered our prices on Preemptible VMs [0], so now is a great time to come over ;).

I haven't found anyone that loves bidding with Spot, and while I respect the ClusterK guys for the improvements they've brought to it, my hope is we convince them to move towards a fixed price as well. It's just simpler for customers.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud, and launched our Preemptible VMs product.

[0] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/08/Preemptible-VMs...

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#166

Post by CaptSpify »

jsingleton wrote: post #161
CaptSpify wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious as to why you think aws means you won't get paged at 4-am? If you have a redundant setup, you won't get paged as everything can just fail-over.

If you set things up badly then you can certainly get paged when on AWS. If you set things up correctly (multiple AZs / regions and auto scaling etc.) then it's much less likely. There could of course be software issues but hardware is no longer your problem and you can let experts do it for you. Yes, you could do this yourself but that would cost more and reduce the advantage. How many colo racks in how many data ce…

> hardware is no longer your problem and you can let experts do it for you.

I've heard this before, but it's basically not true. You still have hardware problems, you're just paying to pretend they aren't there anymore. If you want to do that, it's OK, but we need to stop pretending that throwing money at a problem makes it go away.

> Yes, you could do this yourself but that would cost more and reduce the advantage.

Compared to AWS pricing? No thanks. I've yet to personally see a company save money by using AWS (ymmv of course).

> Even with redundant hot spare fail-over you will need to fix the hardware at some point and will be running at risk until you do.

Sure, but that's generally where you save your money. And if you do it right, it doesn't have to be at 4 am

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#167

Post by boulos »

api wrote: post #52

Personally I am partial to heterogeneous deployments across commodity vendors like Digital Ocean, Vultr, Linode, OVH, etc. You do have to think a little bit more about security and devops but you get a lot of power and robustness for a lot less money. We do use S3 for backups and big storage. That has no equal.

Google Cloud Storage (GCS) is in my (biased) opinion better than S3 in most ways.

GCS's default buckets just work within all the US. For no extra $$, you get something you can read and write to at massive throughput in us-west1 (Oregon), us-central1 (Iowa) and us-east1 (South Carolina). This has totally changed how people use our compute offering compared to say EC2 plus S3.

Similarly, we introduced Nearline which S3 sort of copied with Infrequent Access. Except S3-IA rounds all files up to 128 KB. Nearline is simple $.01/GB/month plus $.01/GB retrieved.

All of this with the team maintaining their own JSON API and compatibility with the S3 API (which I use from my NAS box at home).

tl;dr: GCS easily goes head to head with S3 (and often comes out on top).

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (and use GCS myself).

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#168

Post by boulos »

olavgg wrote: post #91

There is a lot of votes here for cloud providers. And while I think AWS is great, it is not great at everything. What I've done recently is buying used servers and 10G/40g network switches from Ebay and rented a colo(colocation) rack, which can be had from $500-$1000 per month per rack. This often includes 100mbit++ internet, power, cooling and more ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colocation_centre ) This has been th…

If what you're after is 24x7 always on machines in a single DC, you're absolutely right: both GCE and EC2 are charging you for a premium you're not using (scale up and down, refresh your machines, handle power failures and maintenance, geographic diversity).

That said, I think your first two examples (Hadoop and Ceph) are competively priced on Google Cloud. With Dataproc, you can put all your HDFS data on GCS and then run your cluster on Preemptible VMs. Combined with the ability to spin up and down as you need it, that's actually hard to beat economically in a colo setup.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#169

Post by boulos »

falsedan wrote: post #58
slake wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion on this is that you still learn and deploy on AWS or GCE. The learning curve might be steep at first but it'll save a lot of heartache when your organization scales or you want to set up a complex deployment that one of the smaller players don't necessarily support.

Classic premature optimisation. Those hours spent mastering the 10s of products you need to use to do it the 'right' way would be better spent on marketing, business logic, and 5 minutes installing apache + php on a Digital Ocean droplet which also is the dev environment. If your company suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune & needs to migrate, you can paid someone who is an expert to help you migrate, b…

You don't need to be a cloud expert to start with GCE or EC2 instead of a VPS provider. If you end up just going straight to GCE instead of a droplet that's not a big mental hurdle. Then as the parent said, if you suddenly need to scale up, bolt on other services (like say GCS or Cloud SQL) you're not starting with a migration.

You will spend more than $5/month on either AWS or GCP, but the example here seems focused on a business not a throwaway. So IMO, it is more like premature optimization to have a $5/month droplet instead of a $30/month set of GCE instances.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#170

Post by mikecb »

boulos wrote: post #155
kaishiro wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't entirely accurate as far as I'm aware. I lean very heavily on Lambda and Google's alternative - Cloud Functions - isn't even available to the public yet since it's invite only and still in alpha.

While true, that's certainly changing (hint, soon). You could also turn the comparison around: AWS has nothing like Dataflow or BigQuery (Redshift only sort of counts). Or even more amusingly, AWS doesn't have a hosted Kubernetes product ;). So I think the parent comment applies, for many people Google Cloud has more than enough services to be considered like-for-like, is missing some you may care about deeply (Redis…

I think you guys should really take a look at the scenarios people are using lambda for and show how those map to appengine, cloud functions, and even endpoints, because they all more than make up for lambda's functionality.
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