pretty much any trendy smaller cloud provider comes with a API today. Think digital ocean or my favorite exoscale. Most of them are by far cheaper than the big 3.
Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?
181–190 of 211 posts
Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?
#182I 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…
price is amazing but the support can suck hard. I had one of my servers down for over 12 hours (even thought i noticed it instantly) because they claimed the issue is on my site. After 12 hours, many telephonates and so more they wrote a simple semi automated email that they found a broken cable and fixed it... Still pissed to this day, but yeah the price for the power is amazing.
Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?
#183If you want to focus on the code and not the servers, give a try to https://zeit.co/now Disclosure: co-founder and CEO
Looks interesting. Can you explain why someone would use this over the alternatives?
Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?
#184Google 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…
My biggest complaint is different rates for network egress. https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing egress for world and then there is China and Australia. It is unpredictable and you can't include it in your price models.
Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?
#185Personally I am partial to heterogeneous deployments across commodity vendors like Digital Ocean, Vultr, Linode, OVH, etc. You do have to think a little bit more about security and devops but you get a lot of power and robustness for a lot less money. We do use S3 for backups and big storage. That has no equal.
Every time I do the math the bandwidth egress costs of AWS and GCE become rather large and non-trivial. How do you make it work for your workloads?
We don't use AWS or GCE. The other providers don't charge anywhere close to as much for bandwidth... to the point that deploying across multiple providers and using the Internet as our backplane network is no issue.
One trick I like is to split infrastructure across 2-3 different providers at at least three different nearby data centers. Example: Chicago (Vultr), Toronto (DO), Montreal (OVH). Latency is low enough for most replication purposes and if one experiences a massive failure the other two will be fine. 3/3 failure probably requires alien invasion or global thermonuclear war.
Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?
#186Personally I am partial to heterogeneous deployments across commodity vendors like Digital Ocean, Vultr, Linode, OVH, etc. You do have to think a little bit more about security and devops but you get a lot of power and robustness for a lot less money. We do use S3 for backups and big storage. That has no equal.
This is exactly what I do and I have had 100% uptime for the last two years.
But that's not Enterprise(tm)!
Seriously... I feel like the Big Cloud vendors are making a ton of money convincing a lot of people that you're not doing it right if you're not using their stuff.
Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Yeah, that was in no way meant to detract from the rest of the Google Cloud offering. I only bring it up because we were just recently looking to migrate some of our serverless tooling (API Gateway/Lambda/Dynamo) and I really wanted to have a crack at the Google stuff (Endpoints/Functions/Datastore), but couldn't since I couldn't get into the alpha.
Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Classic premature optimisation. Those hours spent mastering the 10s of products you need to use to do it the 'right' way would be better spent on marketing, business logic, and 5 minutes installing apache + php on a Digital Ocean droplet which also is the dev environment. If your company suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune & needs to migrate, you can paid someone who is an expert to help you migrate, b…
That is a false dichotomy. The reality should fall in between, learn enough to understand some of the design choices you make, but don't overcook it.
I don't think it's a false dichotomy: I can only do one thing at a time, and my time is limited.
Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
> - Nearly perfect documentation > - Awesome support Two things never said about google products
This thread will give you an idea of how far Google's support will go to make a customer succeed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12606995 (work at GCP)
You meant to say "a customer that is pumping tons of money into Google succeed". Your average customer gets no such treatment.
Sorry, Google has some great stuff, and is great at a lot of things, but customer support is not one of them.
Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
This thread will give you an idea of how far Google's support will go to make a customer succeed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12606995 (work at GCP)
You meant to say "a customer that is pumping tons of money into Google succeed". Your average customer gets no such treatment. Sorry, Google has some great stuff, and is great at a lot of things, but customer support is not one of them.
Perhaps the reputation you speak of transfers over from the B2C side, where Google makes services for billions and can't offer the human touch as easily.
Have you had bad experiences with Google Cloud platform support specifically?
I can only offer some customer voices:
- Quizlet calls out support as a major reason for choosing GCP over AWS (among other things) [0]
- "Paid Support is top notch" [1]
- Spotify calls out the human side specifically [2]
[0] https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-gcp
[1] https://lugassy.net/why-we-moved-from-amazon-web-services-to...
[2] https://news.spotify.com/au/2016/02/23/announcing-spotify-in...