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Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

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Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#141

Post by Jean-Philipe »

mateuszf wrote: post #108
Jean-Philipe wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is just using AWS and is at least twice as expensive.

And allows to forget about lot of configuration, automation and scaling. Which also has lot of value.

Sure, from a usability point of view, I enjoyed Heroku a lot and it's certainly easier to use than Elastic Beanstalk. If it just wasn't that expensive. Amazon drops their prices around twice a year (AFAIR), but I cannot remember Heroku ever dropping their prices. They did change their pricing structure recently, but I wasn't able to tell if it actually got cheaper or not.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#142

Post by bpicolo »

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…

The only thing stopping me from using Google Cloud atm is hosted Postgres.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#143

Post by jsingleton »

byefruit wrote: post #127
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 offe…

I run quite a lot of apps on Azure but normally just stick to their PaaS offerings as I don't usually want to bother administering the server at the OS level. When I do IaaS level stuff and want to connect directly to instances I've used AWS. It's massively oversimplifying, but I think Azure is stronger for PaaS and AWS is better for IaaS if you want to do more yourself.

The dual admin web app thing is a massive pain but once everything is set up you don't have to go near it often. If you use CI then you'll normally just git push.

My blog (https://unop.uk/) is running on Azure and although I've had a few problems they seem to be node/ghost related. If you want to run WordPress then AWS is probably better as they support MySQL natively.

Shameless plug: I cover some of this in my book. For example, in the final chapter I highlight a couple of the advanced features such as Azure ML and HDInsight. https://www.packtpub.com/mapt/book/Application%20Development...

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#144

Post by aibottle »

imaginenore wrote: post #102
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…

"great pricing" it is not. None of the major cloud providers have great pricing with the exception of some niche cases. Look at Hetzner. Look at the cheap VPS options. Google/AWS don't come even close.

Yeah Hetzner is nice if you just need VMs and set up everything yourself. The big plus of GCP and AWS is the Platform. If you don't need hosted MySQL (because you want to set up that stuff yourself) or PubSub, Storage etc. go for Hetzner.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#145

Post by jdc0589 »

byefruit wrote: post #127
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 offe…

Azure is paying the penalty for being late to the game. They are making the exact same mistakes AWS made with the whole service fragmentation with the introduction of VPCs, except with azure its fragmentation of ARM vs Classic. fragmented UIs, fragmented documentation, fragmented CLIs (literally, the powershell and the xplatform cli have totally different sets of commands).

They are slowly making progress. Disk IO isn't horrible, you just have to over-provision premium storage when it really matters (just like you do in AWS with GP2 volumes). That said, their concept of storage accounts for housing volumes/disks is absolutely horrible. Luckily I hear mumblings of change there.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#146

Post by jsingleton »

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…

Colo is certainly a cheap way to do things for a steady load, and you get great performance for the money, but who wants to get paged at 4am?

I know HN and StackOverflow do things this way but I don't even want to manage the OS these days. We used to host our servers on-site and it was a massive pain. At least with colo you don't need to personally worry about power or internet going down, but you still need to replace dead disks.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#147

Post by notwedtm »

NetStrikeForce wrote: post #22

I'm not sure you're looking for an AWS alternative if you think DigitalOcean is one. Right now only Azure (behind) and Google Cloud (way behind) are alternatives to AWS. If what you need is just VMs and a CRUD API, then yes, DO is a very good alternative (I run most of my servers with them).

What about GCE makes you feel they are further behind AWS than Azure? Azure has more regions, but my experience is that GCE is quickly catching up in features and services in comparison to AWS.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#149

Post by lobo_tuerto »

bpicolo wrote: post #142
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…

The only thing stopping me from using Google Cloud atm is hosted Postgres.

What about this? https://cloud.google.com/solutions/set-up-postgres
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