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Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

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Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#131

Post by spartacle »

AlexB138 wrote: post #117
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.

Rackspace is, unfortunately, woefully behind the times when it comes to functionality. You're also looking at long term, very expensive, contracts for individual physical boxes if you're doing a hybrid approach. Their once-fanatical-support has also taken a major quality hit due to all the waves the company has had to ride out. Even as a one-time fan, I would be hard pressed to start a new project on RS.

I work at Rackspace, and our Public Cloud is run on Openstack, so it's hardly 'woefully behind the times when it comes to functionality'. We have one of the old, and largest deployments of OS there is, so there are some technical challenges and loads of new features coming.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#132

Post by osipov »

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…

I did a cost analysis of Amazon GPUs vs. Softlayer GPUs and the latter gave me a better price/performance ratio.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#133

Post by dogma1138 »

When you say "AWS" what do you mean? there are tons of services under the AWS umbrella; to which specific ones are you looking for alternatives?

If it's just "VPS" then there are plenty of providers, some even offer a compatibility with the AWS API (IIRC even Rackspace does that these days).

If you are looking for an AWS specific service/platform e.g. Elasticsearch then you need to be specific.

Overall AWS has a pretty extensive platform which is hard to beat, it's "META API" which governs security, users, deployments etc. is also one of it's key advantages.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#134

Post by michaelt »

vayarajesh wrote: post #65

Google cloud - I have recently been working on setting up our company's entire infrastructure on google cloud and we were up and running in no time (very happy currently). - Great pricing - Great API (command line, REST) - Nearly perfect documentation - Awesome support (I had requested to allow more static ip addresses to be reserved and they resolved my ticket in less than 4 hours) - Very intuitive interface They gi…

  Nearly perfect documentation
I've Google Cloud's documentation pretty awful, at least when it comes to authentication - which you need to do to get started with almost anything.

AWS starts out simple (Paste your access key and secret key here) and you can adopt very complicated practices as your needs evolve; Google Cloud's design and documentation, on the other hand, seems to jump to very complicated from the start (scopes, service accounts, user accounts, projects, application default credentials, PKCS12, access tokens, refresh tokens...)

I haven't found the documentation very helpful at all - or perhaps the system is just too complicated for the documentation to ever be much good.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#135

Post by _1 »

vayarajesh wrote: post #65

Google cloud - I have recently been working on setting up our company's entire infrastructure on google cloud and we were up and running in no time (very happy currently). - Great pricing - Great API (command line, REST) - Nearly perfect documentation - Awesome support (I had requested to allow more static ip addresses to be reserved and they resolved my ticket in less than 4 hours) - Very intuitive interface They gi…

> - Nearly perfect documentation > - Awesome support

Two things never said about google products

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#136

Post by bikamonki »

apapli wrote: post #72

There's a little company called Microsoft. Word on the street is they are averaging one new data centre a week now. Although a bit behind AWS they are exceptional at copying market leaders and are getting some good traction with folks like Adobe. Seriously, worth a look if you need a solid alternative to AWS.

You meant

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#137

Post by ngrilly »

In my opinion, Google Compute Engine is a great alternative to AWS, better in most aspects. For something simpler, if you're looking for an alternative to Digital Ocean and are in Europe, excoscale.ch is interesting.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#138

Post by imroot »

osipov wrote: post #132
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…

I did a cost analysis of Amazon GPUs vs. Softlayer GPUs and the latter gave me a better price/performance ratio.

But what you'll get in performance, you'll lose in sanity.

I know that everyone has their "Horror" stories about a provider that they'd avoid at all costs, but, Softlayer still has an IBM "Mindset." Provisioning servers? You ask them, then their sales team approves -- hardly automatic. Seemingly minor changes to their system will force a hypervisor restart, and dealing with their account reps for anything is a nightmare.

I'm not saying that Amazon is the end-all, be-all; I'm just saying that the grass isn't greener on the softlayer side of the fence.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#139

Post by sokoloff »

imroot wrote: post #138
osipov wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a cost analysis of Amazon GPUs vs. Softlayer GPUs and the latter gave me a better price/performance ratio.

But what you'll get in performance, you'll lose in sanity. I know that everyone has their "Horror" stories about a provider that they'd avoid at all costs, but, Softlayer still has an IBM "Mindset." Provisioning servers? You ask them, then their sales team approves -- hardly automatic. Seemingly minor changes to their system will force a hypervisor restart, and dealing with their account reps for anything is a nightm…

Softlayer made my "do not do business with again" list after about 3 years of renting a server from them. I cancelled the server within what I believed (and still believe) to be the time required and they billed me an extra month, refusing to acknowledge the cancellation was timely submitted.

They sit right behind Oracle and Verisign on the "never again" list.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#140

Post by omginternets »

ekiara wrote: post #114
omginternets wrote: post #88

On a related note, is there a SaaS platform for access to cheap (~ $.001 +/- $.002 per Gb) disk space?

You could tie your cheap or free Openshift/Heroku to multiple free BackBlaze B2 storage accounts. Depending on how 'grey' you're willing to behave you can get away with doing a lot on a virtually free infrastructure.

Could you please elaborate? What is involved in doing this?
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