Ask HN: Which cloud do you use, and why? • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by rsync » Thu, May 21, 2015, 4:25 PM UTC

xtrumanx wrote: post #59

rsync wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, my system runs nothing but sendmail, lighttpd (with no modules or features) and sshd. That's it. So there's not much to lock down. sshd is hidden behind port knocking, for what that's worth. (No, I do not want to have a religious argument about port knocking this morning) The real key to the simplicity and security of my setup is email over SSH with a console client. Not only does that remove oceans of attack s…

Thank you for introducing me to port knocking (wikipedia link for the unintiated [0]). Not trying to lure into an argument you're trying to avoid but I'm just curious; what is the religious argument about regarding port knocking? I know about both sides to tabs/spaces and vim/emacs but am curious what people have against port knocking. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_knocking

Heh.

In short, port knocking is a very, very short/weak password. And is a very weak authentication measure.

This is absolutely true and nobody could argue that.

So if you only did port knocking, or if you depended on port knocking, you're making a bad decision.

I believe in defense in depth, and therefore I think that port knocking on top of everything else you already do has good value - especially considering how simple and lightweight knockd is and my experience of it running stably for years at a time.

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

#62

Post by danwakefield » Thu, May 21, 2015, 4:28 PM UTC

xtrumanx wrote: post #59

rsync wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, my system runs nothing but sendmail, lighttpd (with no modules or features) and sshd. That's it. So there's not much to lock down. sshd is hidden behind port knocking, for what that's worth. (No, I do not want to have a religious argument about port knocking this morning) The real key to the simplicity and security of my setup is email over SSH with a console client. Not only does that remove oceans of attack s…

Thank you for introducing me to port knocking (wikipedia link for the unintiated [0]). Not trying to lure into an argument you're trying to avoid but I'm just curious; what is the religious argument about regarding port knocking? I know about both sides to tabs/spaces and vim/emacs but am curious what people have against port knocking. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_knocking

Many say it is useless. With passwords + root login disabled to login someone must break your keypair, unlikely to be accomplished by anyone who wouldn't also have the resources to knock ports.

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

#63

Post by radlad » Thu, May 21, 2015, 4:46 PM UTC

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #11

Linode. Support is great, service is great, pricing is good, and seems less "cowboyish" than Digital Ocean and others.

And the pricing is almost equivalent to Digital Ocean at this point, so long as you're not looking to spin instances up and down for periods less than a month.

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

#64

Post by radlad » Thu, May 21, 2015, 4:47 PM UTC

ic-junk wrote: post #60

denzil_correa wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the user just copy-pasted the linked comment. The linked comment account is quite old - 2487 days.

No copy and pasting. 2 Different users posting around the same time. We just had same experiences. Mine was originally all in one sentence but I edited it after and reformatted to be bullet points.

The same points, in the same order, in the same hour.

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

#65

Post by steelframe » Thu, May 21, 2015, 4:49 PM UTC

Google Compute Engine. Their Cloud Security team is staffed with rock stars in the industry.

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

#66

Post by Avalaxy » Thu, May 21, 2015, 5:09 PM UTC

Gys wrote: post #45

slg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wanted to try Azure a few weeks ago for a small project. But I found the UI to be confusing. Part old and part new ? Trying to match up with the current Windows look (which I am not familiar with) ? I also had trouble using one of their API's. Got even thrown out very quickly for abusing it. No idea why, just trying to access. Maybe MS does not like my coding style :-) Never had something like that before. Referenc…

If you really want to manage your Azure you'll have to go PowerShell anyway.

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

#67

Post by ZainRiz » Thu, May 21, 2015, 5:34 PM UTC

A good first question to ask is what are your needs?

Do you just need to host a web site with some storage? If you're looking at an ecosystem which services interest you?

You might find this article useful: http://www.troyhunt.com/2015/02/stories-from-trenches-sizing...

[Dislaimer: I'm a dev in the Azure Web Apps (was called Azure Websites) team]

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

#68

Post by 3pt14159 » Thu, May 21, 2015, 6:43 PM UTC

shortstuffsushi wrote: post #39

3pt14159 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just wish there was a single VM that wasn't SSD backed. I write web crawlers sometimes and I usually only have to parse the HTML / JS once into JSON or SQL, but I like to keep the data backed up just in case I need to re-parse it later, or to see the changes between crawls. It's completely impossible for me to even fit it on their $640 / month box. But I love Digital Ocean for everything else.

Couldn't you potentially push that aspect elsewhere, into a data storage solution like S3 or something (not sure of the cost efficiency, not a huge cloud guy myself). Then you'd just be utilizing the DO server for processing. It would have the added benefit of allowing you to scale your crawling horizontally if you wanted, as all your servers could have access to the same set of data.

Yeah I could, and I currently do - but I don't like to. I want the data on the same network for lots of reasons and I also don't like maintaining two sets of deployment systems. I'd prefer to just use Cloud66 + Digital Ocean and focus on writing code, not setting up and maintaining servers.

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

#69

Post by Blackthorn » Thu, May 21, 2015, 7:34 PM UTC

I've used Google Compute Engine to host new web sites. It's cheap, it's rock solid.

I'm still running my fairly large wiki on Linode, just because I haven't had the time to properly migrate it to Compute Engine.

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

#70

Post by lewisl9029 » Thu, May 21, 2015, 7:57 PM UTC

I'm using Azure.

Mostly because of this very little known offering called the Microsoft Action Pack subscription: https://mspartner.microsoft.com/en/ca/Pages/Membership/actio...

It costs around $500 per year, offers your company access to a large number of Microsoft software licenses, free access to seats of Office 365 Enterprise (for hosted email on your own domain, in addition to the software), and most importantly, $110 in Azure credits per month.

The Azure credits alone make this an amazing deal that essentially cuts all Azure pricing by more than half, making it more than competitive with AWS/GCE/DO on the pricing front.