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Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

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Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#91

Post by olavgg »

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 the most cost effective way for me to deploy for example Hadoop, Ceph, Elasticsearch, Huge Varnish cache solutions. While I understand this is not for everyone, it is absolutely something to consider if you have a strong devops team. I do all this myself as I've build my own automation tools over the years that simplify setup and monitoring.

On the other hand, I use AWS for GPU instances as I find it very cost effective because it is very easy to scale up and down by demand. And investing in this kind of hardware is expensive/risky. The power efficiency / performance is still following Moores law for each year for GPU's, and I expect new hardware that is better optimized for neural networks / machine learning is just around the corner.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#92

Post by jnsaff2 »

pdelgallego wrote: post #89
jsingleton wrote: post #79

Azure looks like the only major one you missed. I've used both AWS and Azure a lot. The best one will obviously depend on your use case but if you avoid lock in it shouldn't matter too much. I may write more on this if people are interested. AWS comparison: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/campaigns/azure-vs-aws/ They have more regions than AWS (30 vs 13): https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/regions/ https://aws.amazo…

I would love to read more about AWS vs Azure, how services compare, and strategies on how to avoid lock in. Any recommendation?

I have previously built a auto-scaling/healing Mesos cluster on AWS for a retail company (scaling heavily during peak and sometimes during promotions) and doing the same on Azure for a much bigger retail organisation at the moment.

So this is my in the trenches comparison:

- AWS documentation is excellent, Azure docs are weird and inconsistent and for some bits nonexistent.

- Azure API's are inconsistent and weird, but once you figure out they work relatively well. But the lack of documentation compounds confusion.

- Azure has a lot of very weird limitations that don't make any sense:

-- Default Centos images are 30GB osDisk and you can't resize them, you have to create your own images if you do want to.

-- You can have SSD's in 128/512/1024GB sizes and you pay for them in full, Spinning disks are billed per actual usage.

-- You have to store your osDisk image in the same storage account as your machine you are running (so you have to pay for your image the full SSD monthly price)

-- You have a VMSS (=Auto Scaling Group) and have a Load Balancer in front of it, your microservice connections fail if the load balancer routes the connection back to the same VM ... you now have to have another VMSS just for load balancing/service discovery.

- Their services labelled Beta are really more like Alpha quality.

- On the plus side, their ARM templates are richer and nicer to use than CloudFormation, however the lack of documentation for them kills all the advantages.

- When you jump all the hoops and get past the issues, the things work relatively well.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#93

Post by 0xmohit »

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…

> we're trying since 3 days to contact anybody from them to get our business back on to the road!

Didn't they already tell you how to "architect applications for resilience"?

I was told that on more than one occasion. Essentially that one should be prepared if features don't work as advertised or unexpected things (including hardware issues) happen.

> First thought after 5 years of paying them a lot of money to migrate somewhere else (e.g. Google).

The thing that works in their favor is that some of the features tend to be a specific to the provider in question. The more one uses those features, chances are that they'd find it increasingly difficult to migrate elsewhere.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#94

Post by ssalat »

planetix wrote: post #77
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…

So you never paid for their support or had interaction with a account manager? Sounds like you had blind trust on your "partner" instead of building connection and paying at least for business support.

Sure – like I've written above: we're paying now and don't receive any response either!

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#95

Post by ssalat »

boundlessdreamz wrote: post #90
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…

While I like GCE more than AWS, when it comes to support GCE is also paid-only. GCE plans are much easier to understand though. TIL AWS support plan cost varies by how much you bill and higher the bill, higher the support cost!. That doesn't make any sense.

Yes, this is absolutely not transparent!

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#96

Post by ssalat »

0xmohit wrote: post #93
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…

> we're trying since 3 days to contact anybody from them to get our business back on to the road! Didn't they already tell you how to "architect applications for resilience"? I was told that on more than one occasion. Essentially that one should be prepared if features don't work as advertised or unexpected things (including hardware issues) happen. > First thought after 5 years of paying them a lot of money to migra…

They're already too successful, if that customer support doesn't change we're migrating to other providers and diversify our hosting environment.

BTW – we always designed everything that there is no heavy lock-in on any provider, I would recommend that anybody else as well!

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#97

Post by kaishiro »

user5994461 wrote: post #20

Google has all the exact same offerings as AWS. The IaaS part is called GCE (Google Compute Engine): https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing Given all your comments in this thread. You seem to struggle quite a lot to understand the market and you didn't clarify what you want to achieve (how many servers do you have now? how many applications do you run? how many dev? how big is your company?) So forgive me for think…

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.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#99

Post by hkt »

thom wrote: post #60

One easy alternative to AWS is just shovelling your cash directly onto a bonfire. However, if you care about the actual server bit, Rackspace have their 'hybrid' cloud offers. There's a small but well-thought-of company in the UK called Bytemark who have a cloud offering but I doubt it qualifies as having a global footprint.

I worked for Bytemark. If you want to automate from the start (even slightly) they're a pitifully bad choice, I am sad to say.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#100

Post by tluyben2 »

crypt1d wrote: post #70

I work as a SysAdmin / DevOps and I tried many of the ones which were mentioned so far. Here is my summary. I'll skip AWS as everyone is familiar with it at this point. Digitalocean - very friendly UI with lots of options to spin quickly virtual machines, in many different regions. Some options for backups, etc, but not much on top. They have an API that could allow you to setup orchestration though, which is pretty…

For just (at least these days) reliable metal I would second OVH. I have been running servers there for 15 years, starting with support in French only. They used to have issues but now they are, for me, best bang for my buck: storage, cpu etc for spidering setups, experimenting, non critical heavy experiments etc. I have many servers which went from that kind of status to full prod because of convenience and they have not let me down through several major version debian updates.
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