Goodbye Google Cloud, Hello Digital Ocean • Hacker News Board

Re: Goodbye Google Cloud, Hello Digital Ocean

#41

Post by gabemart » Tue, Nov 28, 2017, 12:59 PM UTC

I'm a bit surprised by the replies talking about serving millions of requests a second, or needing ultra-consistent packet latency. Perhaps most of the HN demo is working for companies that operate at that scale.

But the OP is talking about running dozens of servers, not hundreds or thousands. My own modest apps have held up to the traffic from being #1 on reddit and not fallen over, never been null routed or nerfed by DO, and served hundreds of millions of requests and hundreds of TBs of data. I have nothing but good things to say about DO.

I have no experience running apps at the "millions of requests a second" scale, and I'm willing to accept DO might be a bad choice at that level. But what percentage of apps will ever reach that scale?

Re: Goodbye Google Cloud, Hello Digital Ocean

#42

Post by tyingq » Tue, Nov 28, 2017, 1:02 PM UTC

tzury wrote: post #27

“Goodbye cloud, hello nice UI for VPS hosting”. If Google’s own premium speedy network, anycast IP, global load balancing and security features bring no benefit to your web operations, then your math might be right. If you need your LB to handle 10s of millions of HTTP/S requests per minute, then what other choices do you have other than Google? F/W default “Everything within a project should allowed”? Sorry, but no…

>Not familiar with other DO capabilities, but cloud platform is not just about a VPS available throu REST API

DO is slowly transforming into a "light" cloud service. They have load balancers, a cloud firewall that's partially VPC like, object storage, block storage, etc.

It is still far from being AWS, but they seem to be headed, at least partially...that way.

I think there's plenty of room for a budget cloud provider that doesn't kill you with network egress charges.

Re: Goodbye Google Cloud, Hello Digital Ocean

#43

Post by kgilpin » Tue, Nov 28, 2017, 1:03 PM UTC

doh wrote: post #19

I think this is called maturity. GCP finally knows who the target customer is, and they're building features for them. DO has really nice and simple UI, but try to spin 5,000 servers and you will see what a hot mess it is. GCP shines at a very large scale. For us, what makes the difference, is the spending predictability and massive discounts coming from running preemptible servers or simply committing to certain usa…

+1 The real money in the cloud business is in the Fortune 1000, not the small fry. 5 years ago it was only startups and Netflix using the cloud. Now the battle is on between AWS, Azure and Google to be the “new data center”.

Re: Goodbye Google Cloud, Hello Digital Ocean

#44

Post by gabemart » Tue, Nov 28, 2017, 1:04 PM UTC

radarsat1 wrote: post #39

Huh. I have zero experience with using cloud services, but I'm a bit surprised by the complexity of both of those UIs. I always assumed it was way simpler than that. Like, I thought it was as simple as using a command-line tool, like "docker run " but "cloud run.." As there any cloud services like that? Where you just specify your environment and CPU features you need etc from a single console command?

You could script something like this pretty simply with the DO api, and there might well be programs out there already that operate in a similar way.

My own needs are modest, but I have provisioning scripts that create and destroy DO droplets on-the-fly from the command line.

Re: Goodbye Google Cloud, Hello Digital Ocean

#45

Post by dividuum » Tue, Nov 28, 2017, 1:05 PM UTC

> Private network is available, unmetered.

It's not private. It's internal and shared with all other customers at the same data center location. I wouldn't be surprise if this misleading marketing resulted in lots of accidentally exposes services.

Re: Goodbye Google Cloud, Hello Digital Ocean

#46

Post by laumars » Tue, Nov 28, 2017, 1:06 PM UTC

mluggy wrote: post #18

halayli wrote: post #15

So he basically uses ec2 equivalent service and is complaining about the existence of other services.

yes. except DO bandwidth is $0.006 instead of $0.09/GB. am I paying extra for the sole existence of other services?

The high bandwidth is because with cloud services like AWS and Google Cloud you'd be serving most traffic from either object storage (like S3) or their CDN. Both of which are in the same region as the DO bandwidth figure you quoted. This not only reduces your compute bandwidth costs but also drastically improves your application performance when under load (and as an added bonus you also reduce your compute CPU costs since they're not serving up static content).

I've found even some relatively simple infrastructures (2x web servers, 1x database server + some extra caching services), AWS actually worked out cheaper than Digital Ocean. The problem is you'd have to approach hosting on platforms like AWS slightly differently than you'd approach hosting on the likes of Digital Ocean. But once you start scaling your application, you'll soon find that you'll want to adopt the aforementioned topology anyway regardless of arguments about AWS/Google/etc vs Digital Ocean.

Re: Goodbye Google Cloud, Hello Digital Ocean

#47

Post by bogomipz » Tue, Nov 28, 2017, 1:06 PM UTC

FBISurveillance wrote: post #5

More of a rant. There's time you need more flexibility. I'm serving 1.2MM requests per second from 3 GCP regions, managing instances and GKE clusters with terraform, and I cannot see how could I possibly set that up in a resilient fashion with DigitalOcean. I think DO is perfect for certain scale apps. You usually care about UI things mostly when you spin up couple servers; but when you operate hundreds of machines y…

>"GCP has it's quirks, e.g. * 130k connections/core limit due to conntrack, * lower networking throughput compared to AWS (16Gbps on GCP vs 25Gbps on AWS),"

Isn't the 130K limit only for core count From: https://cloud.google.com/vpc/docs/firewalls

130000 per instance for instances with shared-core machine types

130000 per CPU for instances with 1 to 8 CPUs

130000 *8 (1040000) per instance for instances with > 8 CPUs

Re: Goodbye Google Cloud, Hello Digital Ocean

#48

Post by nickjj » Tue, Nov 28, 2017, 1:23 PM UTC

Let's not forget how great DO's support is too.

Even if you're only operating at 1x $5/month droplet (their lowest instance type), you'll still get top grade email support included with your plan.

Getting a response in a few hours is almost guaranteed and often times they'll even help you debug problems that go beyond the scope of their infrastructure.

Compare that to something like AWS which charge you an extra $29/month minimum (or 3% of your AWS bill) to speak to an entry level support person through email.

Re: Goodbye Google Cloud, Hello Digital Ocean

#49

Post by Permagate » Tue, Nov 28, 2017, 1:33 PM UTC

radarsat1 wrote: post #39

Huh. I have zero experience with using cloud services, but I'm a bit surprised by the complexity of both of those UIs. I always assumed it was way simpler than that. Like, I thought it was as simple as using a command-line tool, like "docker run " but "cloud run.." As there any cloud services like that? Where you just specify your environment and CPU features you need etc from a single console command?

You could spin up a server with just one AWS CLI command (and most likely google console, but I have no experience with it). As you said, just specify the server spec in the command option. Though, AWS CLI is very verbose with their commands, imo.

Anything more complex, such as weaving several server under one VPC with a load balancer and routing configuration, I'd recommend checking out terraform. It also supports multiple cloud providers.

Re: Goodbye Google Cloud, Hello Digital Ocean

#50

Post by mluggy » Tue, Nov 28, 2017, 1:39 PM UTC

laumars wrote: post #46

mluggy wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes. except DO bandwidth is $0.006 instead of $0.09/GB. am I paying extra for the sole existence of other services?

The high bandwidth is because with cloud services like AWS and Google Cloud you'd be serving most traffic from either object storage (like S3) or their CDN. Both of which are in the same region as the DO bandwidth figure you quoted. This not only reduces your compute bandwidth costs but also drastically improves your application performance when under load (and as an added bonus you also reduce your compute CPU costs…

S3 is $0.023/GB (still x4 higher), plus $0.004 per 10K requests CloudFront is $0.085/GB, plus $0.0075-$0.01 per 10K requests) GCP is $0.08-0.12/GB (same for all services), plus $5 per 1M requests) And who says most of the bandwidth goes towards static assets? 99% of our requests are dynamic (thus the NodeJS frontends)