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Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#31

Post by dx034 »

acapybara wrote: post #21
bartread wrote: post #19

Yeah, but it was only for a side-project, so I only had a single VM to migrate. I went from AWS (cost ~£25/mo) to Microsoft Azure DE because I didn't want any user data to be subject to search by US law enforcement/national security. I thought the bill would be about the same, but it more than quadrupled almost overnight even though traffic levels, etc., were the same (i.e., practically non-existent). What was happen…

+1 on dedicated server. It's so much simpler & cost effective than the cloud. 10 big dedicated servers can probably handle the same load as 100s to 1000s of cloud nodes for a fraction of the cost. Configuration and general complexity might even be simpler without the cloud. It's not as hard as people make it out to be to set up backup and redundancy/failover.

Absolutely. And dedicated servers at many providers (e.g. Hetzner, OVH) can be provisioned much like vms. So the only real difference is that usually there's a minimum contract of 1 month, but often at a price where it's cheaper than running a VM at a cloud provider for 30% of the time.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#32

Post by [deleted] »

alberth wrote: post #11
StreamBright wrote: post #7

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

I’m really curious how this math adds up given how inexpensive OVH is. Other people in this exact thread are saying they experienced an 80% cost reduction by moving from AWS to OVH. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30943058

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#33

Post by bombcar »

Hardik_Shah wrote: post #13

I have. I was working for a company that had its own data centers, but we were running out of space and time to add more. We were already using Rackspace as a managed hosting provider (we didn't want to manage our own infrastructure), so we decided to move from our data center to Rackspace's data center. The difference in terms of services was negligible, because they all offered almost identical services. But we did…

Interesting - we moved the other direction (to Linode) from Rackspace because their VM/dedicated pricing was just out of whack. Our new box was nominally the same as the old at half the price, but the "4 CPU" was so much newer that it was nearly 2x.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#34

Post by dx034 »

dustinmoris wrote: post #20
bartread wrote: post #19

Yeah, but it was only for a side-project, so I only had a single VM to migrate. I went from AWS (cost ~£25/mo) to Microsoft Azure DE because I didn't want any user data to be subject to search by US law enforcement/national security. I thought the bill would be about the same, but it more than quadrupled almost overnight even though traffic levels, etc., were the same (i.e., practically non-existent). What was happen…

Oh god quadrupled from £25/month for a small low traffic project as you have described sounds like daytime robbery!

It might be different if you're a developer in SV, but I'd say for most people, that's not insignificant. That's more expensive than most hobbies, I wouldn't spend £100 on a side project if there's an alternative.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#35

Post by alberth »

StreamBright wrote: post #28
alberth wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m really curious how this math adds up given how inexpensive OVH is. Other people in this exact thread are saying they experienced an 80% cost reduction by moving from AWS to OVH. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30943058

One phrase: right sizing. The original infra on OVH used an instance type that was suboptimal for the workload. Because re-provisioning was not an option due to the size of the cluster, especially without moving hard drives we had only one option. Move the data to S3, find the right instance type and switch over. The ability to right size your infra is grossly underrated. Decoupling data from compute too. We are talk…

Would you mind sharing what size instance types you were on at OVH and are on now at AWS.

I ask because I've found that even radically larger sized OVH hardware is still way less expensive than AWS.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#37

Post by phillu »

bombcar wrote: post #30
bartread wrote: post #19

Yeah, but it was only for a side-project, so I only had a single VM to migrate. I went from AWS (cost ~£25/mo) to Microsoft Azure DE because I didn't want any user data to be subject to search by US law enforcement/national security. I thought the bill would be about the same, but it more than quadrupled almost overnight even though traffic levels, etc., were the same (i.e., practically non-existent). What was happen…

There are two kinds of cloud users - those who treat their cloud as a VM to use, and those who actually use all the fancy API features. The first group are almost always better served by dedicated VMs or hardware from a provider specializing in the, if the VM is long-lived.

That's something I find so fascinating. The "cloud" will almost always be more expensive and "not worth it" if you are only using the IaaS services. I mean, look at the numbers, everyone sees that.

Cloud only ever is worth it when one uses the higher-tier services, like AWS Lambda and the likes. Even running Kubernetes in the cloud is only semi worth it, because it's not high enough in the stack and still touches too many low-level IaaS services.

Of course, higher tier means more vendor lock-in and more knowledge required and all that. But if you are not willing to pay that price, then OVH, Hetzner and the likes will have better offerings for you.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#38

Post by dx034 »

eric4smith wrote: post #27

Moved from Google Cloud -> Digital Ocean -> OVH. Running our own stuff on high powered servers is very easy and less trouble than you think. Sorted out the deploy with a "git push" and build container(s) meant we could just "Set it and forget it". We have a bit under a terabyte of Postgresql data. Any cloud is prohibitively expensive. I think some people think that the cloud is as good a sliced bread. It does not rea…

I also found that running a PostgreSQL database is really simple. Especially if most of your workload is read only, a few dedicated servers at several providers with a PostgreSQL cluster can deliver 100% uptime and more than enough performance for pretty much any use case. At the same time, this will still be cheaper than one managed database at any cloud provider.

I've been running a PostgreSQL cluster with significant usage for a few years now, never had more than a few seconds downtime and I spend next to no time maintaining the database servers (apart from patching). If most requests are read only, clusters are so easy to do in Postgres. And even if one of the providers banned my account, I'd just promote a server at another provider to master and could still continue without downtime.

I recently calculated what a switch to a cloud provider would cost, and it was at least 10x of what I pay now, for less performance and with lock-in effects.

But I understand that there are business cases and industries where outsourcing makes sense.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#39

Post by dagw »

If so why?

Company policy change. We went from each office (or even department) basically doing their own thing and having their own billing accounts and negotiating (or not) their own deals, to one central cloud deal with central billing and administration.

The change from everybody doing their own thing to having a central devops strategy we all had to work within was a much bigger change than the actual changing of cloud providers.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#40

Post by vidarh »

Yes. I once did zero downtime migration first from AWS to Google, then from Google to Hetzner for a client. Mostly for cost reasons: they had a lot of free credits, and moved to Hetzner when they ran out.

Their savings from using the credits were at least 20x what the migrations cost.

We did the migration by having reverse proxies in each environment that could proxy to backends each place, set up a VPN between them, and switched DNS. Trickiest part was the database failover and ensuring updates would be retried transparently after switching master.

Upside was that afterwards they had a setup that was provider agnostic and ready to do transparent failover of every part of the service, all effectively paid for through the free credits they got.

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