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Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

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Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#151

Post by CaptSpify »

jsingleton wrote: post #146
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 repla…

Curious as to why you think aws means you won't get paged at 4-am?

If you have a redundant setup, you won't get paged as everything can just fail-over.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#152

Post by tracker1 »

bbcbasic wrote: post #24
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…

Is using Digital Ocean and administering your own box simpler than using the off the shelf DB/storage options provide db AWS? Surely the AWS options save you doing all the DBA / Server admin / security work. Albeit for more money but time = money.

It would be interesting to see how well the AWS/Azure SaaS offerings for db and other storage work from DO/Linode at various locations...

I've thought about running an app or two on DO, but keeping the data in Azure Storage Tables, and possible Azure SQL... or similar AWS services.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#153

Post by boulos »

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.

Would you be willing to talk to one of our Product Managers about what you need in a hosted Postgres to come over? ;).

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#154

Post by boulos »

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.

Pricing of compute on GCE is extremely competitive. The per-minute billing (which Azure matched) really adds up for tons of workloads. Similarly, our custom shapes means you don't end up paying for twice as many cores (16 => 32) when you really want something in between.

Where I do agree is networking egress. The big three providers all have metered bandwidth rates that are way above the "all inclusive" fee you pay to Hetzner, OVH, DO, and others. The cheapest way to host an ftp server that serves 20 TB per month is certainly on one of these (today). None of these providers will let you serve 1 PB / month this way, but if you're in their sweet spot and they can make it work out on average, it's a good fit.

But if you're looking to just have a simple "VPS" in the cloud, our f1-micro is just over $4/month (the AWS t2 series is also super cheap). Again, you're right if you're talking about networking egress, but not everybody needs to serve multiple TB per month.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud, so I'm trying to take your money in exchange for services.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#155

Post by boulos »

kaishiro wrote: post #97
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.

While true, that's certainly changing (hint, soon). You could also turn the comparison around: AWS has nothing like Dataflow or BigQuery (Redshift only sort of counts). Or even more amusingly, AWS doesn't have a hosted Kubernetes product ;).

So I think the parent comment applies, for many people Google Cloud has more than enough services to be considered like-for-like, is missing some you may care about deeply (Redis!), but may have others that AWS doesn't.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

PS: I'm assuming you're in the Cloud Functions Alpha, if not, feel free to send along your project number and we'll whitelist you.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#156

Post by boulos »

tracker1 wrote: post #152
bbcbasic wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is using Digital Ocean and administering your own box simpler than using the off the shelf DB/storage options provide db AWS? Surely the AWS options save you doing all the DBA / Server admin / security work. Albeit for more money but time = money.

It would be interesting to see how well the AWS/Azure SaaS offerings for db and other storage work from DO/Linode at various locations... I've thought about running an app or two on DO, but keeping the data in Azure Storage Tables, and possible Azure SQL... or similar AWS services.

You would pay a lot for the egress ($.08/GB or so) and it'd be painfully far away. MySQL ends up caching queries quite well for many web apps, so you quickly get into sub-ms territory for it to just return the cached answer. This all goes out the window, even if you're 5ms away (say DO in San Francisco to AWS in Northern California).

tl;dr: Don't do it.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#157

Post by NetStrikeForce »

notwedtm wrote: post #147
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.

That's the impression I get from following these series of comparisons (unfinished! I guess there's a chance my opinion might change at the end of it): https://blogs.endjin.com/2016/07/aws-vs-azure-vs-google-clou...

I also e.g. have the impression that the most comprehensive/complete/ready to use container solution seems to be GKE, so on some specific areas there would be different "winners". In overall terms I got the feeling Google has a simpler offering than AWS and Azure.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#158

Post by vayarajesh »

michaelt wrote: post #134
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…

They have a in-app interactive tutorials which guides each step necessary to get you started which was pretty cool.

We currently use more of compute engine and the documentation for it was really clear for us. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/

May be needs more clarification in general I guess

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#159

Post by boulos »

user5994461 wrote: post #105
slake wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion on this is that you still learn and deploy on AWS or GCE. The learning curve might be steep at first but it'll save a lot of heartache when your organization scales or you want to set up a complex deployment that one of the smaller players don't necessarily support.

> when your organization scales Case in point: AWS/GCE are intended for organizations. If you're not operating an organization, they're overkill. Do the Quick test: Is your budget less than $100/month? If yes, use Digital Ocean.

I'm not sure I agree! Yours isn't a bad test, but honestly for many people I route them to App Engine depending on their need ("you just want a simple Python web app with no traffic and no hassle? Yeah, you should use GAE").

Having to deal with any infrastructure at all, even for a few hours per year is certainly going to make a VPS a worse choice for some folks.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

#160

Post by chucky_z »

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.

We dumped Rackspace for AWS. I tried desperately to get them to do anything for us about their cloud as we had dedicated servers and needed to grow a bit. I was able to order a huge dedicated server at an OK price, but FFS it took eight weeks to be available for use.

I asked a ton of times about their cloud stuff and just got re-directed back to dedicated servers. I got tired of it, went to AWS, and haven't looked back. Using reserved instances and scaling groups we're paying about 10% less per month for 8x the number of servers, and slightly more cpu/memory/disk overall (we had some pretty beefy stuff at Rackspace).

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