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Ask HN: Which cloud provider to use in 2016? AWS or GCE?

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Re: Ask HN: Which cloud provider to use in 2016? AWS or GCE?

#51

Post by jlawer »

GCP is a non-starter for us due to Region support. No Australia, Singapore or even US west regions means that latency is too high. CDN / caching can make web performance acceptable, but service performance will always suffer. Unfortunately over half of .au traffic routes to Asia via the US west coast (due to lower cost), with the rest route via Japan, Guam or Singapore. This means Taiwan would be a 300ms route for a significant portion of our audience.

AWS is what we use for cloud provisioning, with Rackspace still hosting some legacy systems. We are moving our workloads off Rackspace as the cost is higher. Azure is a possibility but unlikely as they are as expensive as AWS and offers nothing that we feel is especially compelling as a Linux shop.

If Digital Ocean, Linode or similar offered an Australian hosting option I would be willing to look at it if the cost was under 2x that of a US region, as I could get a similar functionality having SaltStack handle provisioning. However knowing bandwidth and related costs in .au I really doubt many want to go through the cost & effort.

Most of the domestic providers are either too expensive ($40-$80 AUD a month for a 1 core / 1gb instance w/ HDD backed storage & 100 GB transfer), and/or aren't run to the scale that you can have confidence that they will be an ongoing competitive business.

Re: Ask HN: Which cloud provider to use in 2016? AWS or GCE?

#52

Post by obulpathi »

elsurudo wrote: post #50
obulpathi wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GCE is less expensive than AWS even with AWS's long-term contracts. If you pay money upfront (losing the interest) and reserve instances for 3 years, then you can beat GCE prices by a small margin. But, if you take into consideration of interest on upfront capital expense, lost flexibility due to reserved instances, cloud cost cuts, GCE beats AWS even with the 3-year commitment. We go to Cloud because Cloud gives us…

> Reserving capacity does not belong to the age of Cloud, it belongs to the age of data centers. Nice, I really like that way of putting it. The promise of the Cloud is, indeed, that it is supposed to abstract you from that, but Reserved Instances reveal what is actually happening behind the curtain.

Yep, that's true. Capacity planning and reserving capacity should be taken care by the Cloud provider and users should be free to spin up and down the resources as and when they need them.

Re: Ask HN: Which cloud provider to use in 2016? AWS or GCE?

#53

Post by edoceo »

ktRolster wrote: post #16
Mizza wrote: post #2

AWS, hands down. They're years ahead, and the support is just as lousy.

Serious question, when would you need to use support? I always wonder that when people say Microsoft is better than Linux because it has support, but actually I've never had a time when I needed Linux support.....

I've had to use the support to find out why their LB kept marking my machines offline. My logs showed all 200 OK responses, time were good. The ELB logs showed success too! But then, magically, every other month ELB would shit. The "support"? Just make a new ELB. Which we did. Nice thing about cloud: don't diagnose issues, just make a new instance of X

Re: Ask HN: Which cloud provider to use in 2016? AWS or GCE?

#54

Post by meta_AU »

jlawer wrote: post #51

GCP is a non-starter for us due to Region support. No Australia, Singapore or even US west regions means that latency is too high. CDN / caching can make web performance acceptable, but service performance will always suffer. Unfortunately over half of .au traffic routes to Asia via the US west coast (due to lower cost), with the rest route via Japan, Guam or Singapore. This means Taiwan would be a 300ms route for a…

Check out Vultr. They used to only offer 1/10th bandwidth to AU, but pretty sure you get full bandwidth now. They are coming close to feature compatible with DigitalOcean (BSD, DNS, anycast dns)

Re: Ask HN: Which cloud provider to use in 2016? AWS or GCE?

#55

Post by jspaetzel »

pki wrote: post #13
ticku wrote: post #10

Are they even comparable? AWS offers full virtual machines. I was under the impression that GCE offers a more high level platform where you run your code in their proprietery environment? If I am not mistaken, using GCE means you are locked in and cannot migrate away easily. That's why I never looked into it closely. I don't want to be at the mercy of a provider.

GCE ~= EC2 GAE ~= Elastic Beanstalk

Might as well toss the azure comparble ones in here while we're at it.

Azure Virtual Machines ~= Google Compute Engine ~= Amazon EC2

Azure Websites/App Service ~= Google App Engine ~= Amazon Elastic Beanstalk

Re: Ask HN: Which cloud provider to use in 2016? AWS or GCE?

#57

Post by Veratyr »

jlawer wrote: post #51

GCP is a non-starter for us due to Region support. No Australia, Singapore or even US west regions means that latency is too high. CDN / caching can make web performance acceptable, but service performance will always suffer. Unfortunately over half of .au traffic routes to Asia via the US west coast (due to lower cost), with the rest route via Japan, Guam or Singapore. This means Taiwan would be a 300ms route for a…

OVH recently sent out surveys suggesting that they're expanding to APAC soon and as others said, Vultr offers Australian instances, albeit with Australian bandwidth prices (thanks Telstra).

Re: Ask HN: Which cloud provider to use in 2016? AWS or GCE?

#58

Post by Veratyr »

jaequery wrote: post #56

anyone know where GCE stands in terms of PCI compliance? i know AWS is a level 1 PCI-compliant service provider and makes it a bit easier during the audit process.

I'm not going to pretend I understand PCI compliance but their certifications are here: https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance

They appear to be PCI DSS v3 compliant?

Re: Ask HN: Which cloud provider to use in 2016? AWS or GCE?

#59

Post by jlawer »

meta_AU wrote: post #54
jlawer wrote: post #51

GCP is a non-starter for us due to Region support. No Australia, Singapore or even US west regions means that latency is too high. CDN / caching can make web performance acceptable, but service performance will always suffer. Unfortunately over half of .au traffic routes to Asia via the US west coast (due to lower cost), with the rest route via Japan, Guam or Singapore. This means Taiwan would be a 300ms route for a…

Check out Vultr. They used to only offer 1/10th bandwidth to AU, but pretty sure you get full bandwidth now. They are coming close to feature compatible with DigitalOcean (BSD, DNS, anycast dns)

Hadn't heard of Vultr, but they look awesome and prices appear right.

BGP is an awesome feature for my use case (mail), but unfortunately 32gb instances aren't available in Sydney and one of the virtual appliances I run have that as the recommended config for the traffic level I am pushing. Other feature that would be really good would be some bulk storage to hold backups on (in addition to the automatic backup feature). Additional Block storage isn't available in SYD.

Thanks for the recommendation.

Re: Ask HN: Which cloud provider to use in 2016? AWS or GCE?

#60

Post by jlawer »

Veratyr wrote: post #57
jlawer wrote: post #51

GCP is a non-starter for us due to Region support. No Australia, Singapore or even US west regions means that latency is too high. CDN / caching can make web performance acceptable, but service performance will always suffer. Unfortunately over half of .au traffic routes to Asia via the US west coast (due to lower cost), with the rest route via Japan, Guam or Singapore. This means Taiwan would be a 300ms route for a…

OVH recently sent out surveys suggesting that they're expanding to APAC soon and as others said, Vultr offers Australian instances, albeit with Australian bandwidth prices (thanks Telstra).

Would be really surprised if OVH hit Australia before Singapore, Tokyo, Hong Kong or Taiwan, but crazier things have happened.

Something worth monitoring, thanks.

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