Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#1

Post by dustinmoris » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 10:21 AM UTC

Has anyone ever switched clouds from one service provider to another (e.g. AWS to Azure or vice versa), partially or entirely?

If so why? They all offer almost identical services. Do small (but maybe significant?) differences or unique products (e.g. Spanner) make such a big difference that it has swayed someone to switch their cloud infrastructure?

I wonder how much these little things matter and how such a transition (in partial or as a whole) went along and how key stakeholders (who were possibly heavily invested in one cloud or felt they were responsible for the initial choice) were convinced to make the switch?

I'd love to hear some stories from real world experiences and crucially what it was that pushed the last domino to make the move.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#2

Post by pettycashstash2 » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 10:26 AM UTC

I went from Digital Ocean to AmazonWEb Services. Mainly to get familiar and train on the platform.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#3

Post by thatwasunusual » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 10:56 AM UTC

Switched from Amazon to Google because I hate Amazon more than Google.

Feature-wise, I'm just as happy. However, I trust Google more, but that probably boils to my hatred again. :)

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#4

Post by fxtentacle » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 11:21 AM UTC

Amazon EC2 to OVH AI Docker. Price for GPU instances went down 80%.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#5

Post by oauea » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 11:39 AM UTC

Yes, switched from AWS to Google to Azure. Don't switch to Azure unless your employer forces you, you will regret it. Google is great on a technical level though, especially if you do things with Kubernetes.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#6

Post by warent » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 11:40 AM UTC

Switched from GCP to my own server hardware. After doing the math it came out that it would pay for itself in less than a year. Depending on individual usecase, cloud can be prohibitively expensive and running a server for a small business really isn't nearly as hard as they'd have you believe

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#7

Post by StreamBright » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 11:42 AM UTC

From OVH to AWS. 30% TCO reduction. This was before the fire.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#8

Post by John23832 » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 11:45 AM UTC

Went from AWS to GCP. Everything we deploy is on Kubernetes, so a combination of Terraform and ArgoCD was pretty easy to move. It was pretty much push button.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#9

Post by someelephant » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 11:49 AM UTC

I'd be surprised if more small businesses hadn't, the credits sales people are willing to give you are massive

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#10

Post by mschuster91 » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 11:52 AM UTC

As long as you keep on using common services that are available everywhere-ish (=virtual machines, NFS file share, managed mysql/pgsql, managed kubernetes, DNS) it's relatively painless to switch if you're using Terraform.

Worst problem in my experience is all the stuff that creeps upon you with time that assumes hardcoded IPs and service names.