Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#121

Post by rbanffy » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 11:42 AM UTC

samblr wrote: post #104

Google app engine with flexible environment is really cool. Google-app-engine couple of years ago was claustrophobic with most of the things baked inside its environment. As a developer I felt restricted and there was the fear of locking in. But with intro of flexible environment its really good for any web application (except ones with real-time communication as sockets arent supported yet). So for now way to work a…

AppScale makes a Google App Engine environment you can deploy on your own infrastructure.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#122

Post by stephengillie » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 11:49 AM UTC

My employer operates 18 data centers in 7 countries around the world. We offer a competitive array of services and features, dynamic networking configuration, numerous ecosystem partners, API access to all of this, and high-quality support. https://www.ctl.io/

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#123

Post by ranman » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 11:51 AM UTC

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…

randhunt@amazon.com -- I'd love to know more. Happy to make amends and figure out a path forward. No response from support should never be the customer experience. Get in touch and I'll take care of it.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#124

Post by ranman » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 11:56 AM UTC

meritt wrote: post #67

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.

AWS is just meeting the needs of the startup community, like the monthly box subscription website who believes they have the same engineering problems as Netflix.

Netflix... which also runs on AWS. Or was that the joke? https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#125

Post by tokenizerrr » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 12:07 PM UTC

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…

How often do you have hardware failures? How do you deal with that? You mention hadoop, so just rotate slaves?

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#126

Post by daddykotex » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 12:09 PM UTC

tluyben2 wrote: post #100

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 hav…

+1 for OVH as well. Super stable VM for a very good prixe.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#127

Post by byefruit » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 12:14 PM UTC

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…

Unfortunately my experiences with Azure so far have been pretty awful.

We have a large amount of free Azure credit and yet our experiences at actually trying to use the platform have been met with frustration.

When we tried about six months back, there were two different administration webapps that both offered different subsets of functionality. The IaaS offering seemed to still be tied very much in to the PaaS offers.

After a few hours of frustration I managed to spin up 8 instances where only 6 had connectivity with each other. I gave up the other 2 instances for lost.

When I finally got Spark running on the remaining 6 instances, local disk IO turned out to be a joke.

I gave up at that point.

Anyone have more recent experiences?

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#128

Post by UK-AL » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 12:20 PM UTC

blahi wrote: post #64

hurricaneSlider wrote: post #5

We use Azure. In some aspects they're playing catch up but if you're a startup and can get into their bizspark program, there are a lot of benefits. They are also making a significant effort to open their platform to Linux, Docker and other cloud technologies beyond Windows.

>In some aspects they're playing catch up And it some aspects, they are way ahead. Analytics is one of those examples.

I like their monitoring tools.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#129

Post by gaius » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 12:21 PM UTC

jburwell wrote: post #2

The following are a few alternatives off the top of my head: * Google Compute Engine * Microsoft Azure * Joyent * IBM BlueMix * Linode (like DigitalOcean more VPS than cloud provider)

    * Aliyun
    * Lucera
    * Oracle

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#130

Post by mmcconnell1618 » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 12:26 PM UTC

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?

Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft so I won't get into comparisons with AWS. I wanted to point out a couple of facts that might be interesting to Hacker News readers:

* 35% of virtual machines in Azure run Linux * Microsoft announced that PowerShell, Service Fabric and SQL Server will be available for Linux * Redis Cache, Hadoop and other open source packages are available as Platform as a Service offerings in addition to you installing and managing on your own machines.