41–50 of 268 posts
Switched from GCP to my own server hardware. After doing the math it came out that it would pay for itself in less than a year. Depending on individual usecase, cloud can be prohibitively expensive and running a server for a small business really isn't nearly as hard as they'd have you believe
Yes, but what about the million new customers you're going to get next week?
Yeah, but it was only for a side-project, so I only had a single VM to migrate. I went from AWS (cost ~£25/mo) to Microsoft Azure DE because I didn't want any user data to be subject to search by US law enforcement/national security. I thought the bill would be about the same, but it more than quadrupled almost overnight even though traffic levels, etc., were the same (i.e., practically non-existent). What was happen…
There are two kinds of cloud users - those who treat their cloud as a VM to use, and those who actually use all the fancy API features. The first group are almost always better served by dedicated VMs or hardware from a provider specializing in the, if the VM is long-lived.
Managing your own infrastructure (with dedicated servers, so no hardware management) isn't too hard, even if you're a small shop. And managing a fleet of AWS services isn't necessarily less work.
Maybe there's a reason all ads for cloud tend to compare it to running your own data center. Because once you get rid of hardware management, it's not really that much easier being in the cloud, at the risk of lock-in and huge surprise bills.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Don't switch to Azure unless your employer forces you, you will regret it. Can you give any details? Pricing, reliability, weird quirks you have to program around, ...?
In my experience a lot of difficultly with Azure arises because a business is probably already using Azure to manage it's IT infrastructure. You then get into sticky situations where IT are unhappy handing over admin access to the Ops teams: for example refusing access to AAD because it is integrated with the _corporate_ domain. This might seem fine on the surface, it's just a people issue, but it can become very tir…
I have. I was working for a company that had its own data centers, but we were running out of space and time to add more. We were already using Rackspace as a managed hosting provider (we didn't want to manage our own infrastructure), so we decided to move from our data center to Rackspace's data center. The difference in terms of services was negligible, because they all offered almost identical services. But we did…
Interesting - we moved the other direction (to Linode) from Rackspace because their VM/dedicated pricing was just out of whack. Our new box was nominally the same as the old at half the price, but the "4 CPU" was so much newer that it was nearly 2x.
Switched from GCP to my own server hardware. After doing the math it came out that it would pay for itself in less than a year. Depending on individual usecase, cloud can be prohibitively expensive and running a server for a small business really isn't nearly as hard as they'd have you believe
Yes, but what about the million new customers you're going to get next week?
Especially for internal use (CI/CD, Analytics), you'd rather want to queue a few things up than always having to consider your budget when you want to run something.
It was painful but Az has improved a lot of the sharp edges I encountered.
Switched from GCP to my own server hardware. After doing the math it came out that it would pay for itself in less than a year. Depending on individual usecase, cloud can be prohibitively expensive and running a server for a small business really isn't nearly as hard as they'd have you believe
With own hardware, scaling is not as easy. You'll have to do a lot more around plumbing too. Networking, security, many other things that you'll have to address. Stuff that has already been solved for you.
And while we made it work by sticking to the least common denominator which was FaaS/IaaS (Lambda, S3, API GW, K8s). It was certainly not easy. We also ignored tools that could've helped us greatly only against a single cloud in order to be multi cloud.
The conclusion after 2 years for us is kind of not that exciting.
[1] AWS is the most mature one, Azure is best suited for Microsoft products and Old Enterprise features. And IBM is best if you use only K8s.
[2] Each cloud has a lot of unique closed code features that are amazing for certain use cases ( Such as Athena for S3 in AWS or Cloud Run in GCP). But relaying on them means you are trapped in that cloud. Looking back, Athena could have simplified our specific solution if we were only on AWS.
[3] Moving between clouds, given shared features, is possible, but is definitely not a couple clicks or couple of Jenkins jobs away. Moving between clouds is a full time job. Finding how to do that little VM thing you did in AWS, now in Azure, will take time and learning. And moving between AWS IAM and Azure AD permission? time, time and time.
[4] Could we have known which cloud is best for us before? No. Only after developing our product we know exactly which cloud would offer us the most suited set of features. Not to mention different credits and discount we got as a startup.
Hope this helps.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m really curious how this math adds up given how inexpensive OVH is. Other people in this exact thread are saying they experienced an 80% cost reduction by moving from AWS to OVH. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30943058
One phrase: right sizing. The original infra on OVH used an instance type that was suboptimal for the workload. Because re-provisioning was not an option due to the size of the cluster, especially without moving hard drives we had only one option. Move the data to S3, find the right instance type and switch over. The ability to right size your infra is grossly underrated. Decoupling data from compute too. We are talk…
Yup moved from AWS --> GCP --> Oracle Most because of cost mitigation.