Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

news.ycombinator.com

71–80 of 268 posts

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#71
post #40

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,…

Would you have a write up in more detail of what you did, even high level. Seems cool thing to do

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#72
Yes, I moved from AWS to GCP while a product was in a late release cycle.

I talk about it in detail in a google cloud podcast: https://www.gcppodcast.com/post/episode-265-sharkmob-games-w...

The primary reasons were: Ease of Use, Support and Cost (in that order).

I had a bunch of what I call "3am topics" which inhibited our ability to perform stressful operations in the middle of the night meaning we minimise our opportunity of successful outcomes when on-call... I'm not a fan of that.

I also argued (quite successfully) the case that AWS was not saving us money or much time when the alternative was renting a handful of servers from a provider.

There were attempts by AWS staff to lock us into the platform but those services (cloudfront and ECS being large ones) worked so poorly that caching/reconciliation layers were added into the product to build resiliency: all that was needed was to replace what populated the cache with something else (eventually we moved to Kubernetes which worked much better).

Cloudformation was so hard to work with (at least our implementation) that replacing it with terraform was easy: the hard part was understanding what was needed and what was fluff.

We also had to care a _lot_ about how the network was setup in AWS, there were issues with MTUs not being aligned by default in some cases for example so we had to write workarounds, and the VPCs being zonal by default meant we had much more complex setups.

Another ease of use topic was the sizing of instances, instead of specifically saying what shape of machine most matches your workload in GCP you allocate a number of cores and you're kinda done. Another ease of use topic was that discounts are provided retroactively via sustained use (though, they do have commitments too) where as in AWS you needed to very carefully carve up your requirements to get significant discounts, or write your application to be as stateless as possible (which you can do in GCP too). This is not a lot better than physical machines because the upfront work of trying to capacity plan is still there... at least if you care about cost.

Regardless, our dev cycles are much more streamlined now, it's rather easy to deploy an entirely new environment, the operations can be handled by a single individual on a part-time basis, which in my opinion is the point of a cloud provider: to save you time.

I can go into much more detail if you have any specific questions.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#73
AWS to Google Cloud. Already mature product (public company). Many potential customers are strongly Amazon-averse. Switching to GCP won some deals that were being lost otherwise.

Anybody's cloud strategy should try and stick to the most basic services/building-blocks possible (containers/vms, storage, databases, queues, load balancers, dns, etc) to facilitate multi-cloud and/or easy switching.

Not that each cloud doesn't have its quirks that you'll have to wrap your head around, but if you go all in with the managed services you're eventually going to have a bad time.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#74
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't switch to Azure unless your employer forces you, you will regret it. Can you give any details? Pricing, reliability, weird quirks you have to program around, ...?

In my experience a lot of difficultly with Azure arises because a business is probably already using Azure to manage it's IT infrastructure. You then get into sticky situations where IT are unhappy handing over admin access to the Ops teams: for example refusing access to AAD because it is integrated with the _corporate_ domain. This might seem fine on the surface, it's just a people issue, but it can become very tir…

I'm pretty sure that B2C is effectively a stand-alone instance of AAD that isn't integrated automatically with other applications and on-premise WSAD.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#75

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…

> Really, I can't see a compelling reason to be in the cloud for the majority of mid-level workloads like ours. I work on a very small team. We have a few developers who double as ops. None of us are or want to be sysadmins. For our case, Amazon's ECS is a massive time and money saver. I spent a week or two a few years ago getting all of our services containerized. Since then we have not had a single full production…

Very similar experience here. I work on a two person "DevOps" team. Without AWS ECS we would have to have a much higher headcount. I get to spend most of my time solving real problems for the engineers on the product team rather than sysadmin work.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#76
In startup mode, we switched multiple times, from Azure to Google Cloud to AWS, chasing those startup credits. Things that were easy to move tended to move quickly, but systems that lost owners or priorities didn't tend to get moved all that quickly, so left a fun legacy of a system or two on an old cloud account.

Growing out of that mode has the team mostly focused on a single cloud provider, with a few things that'll remain on alternatives because they're better suited, and projects will clean up the rest in a couple of years.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#77
post #72

Yes, I moved from AWS to GCP while a product was in a late release cycle. I talk about it in detail in a google cloud podcast: https://www.gcppodcast.com/post/episode-265-sharkmob-games-w... The primary reasons were: Ease of Use, Support and Cost (in that order). I had a bunch of what I call "3am topics" which inhibited our ability to perform stressful operations in the middle of the night meaning we minimise our opp…

> Cloudformation was so hard to work with (at least our implementation) that replacing it with terraform was easy: the hard part was understanding what was needed and what was fluff.

I hated cloudformation when I first started using it. To get started the documentation sucks. Once you get the hang of it the docs are great and is actually really simple. I now quite like it.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#78
post #47
post #6

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

Cloud isn't about cost though. Cloud is about value. You can scale super easy when you inevitably need it (assuming you've "made it" anyway - whatever that means). You get a burst of new users, it's trivial to add additional nodes (again, assuming you've set up your infra to be easily scalable). With own hardware, scaling is not as easy. You'll have to do a lot more around plumbing too. Networking, security, many oth…

That "inevitably" is doing some really heavy lifting in your post. It practically never comes for most companies.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#79

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…

> Really, I can't see a compelling reason to be in the cloud for the majority of mid-level workloads like ours. I work on a very small team. We have a few developers who double as ops. None of us are or want to be sysadmins. For our case, Amazon's ECS is a massive time and money saver. I spent a week or two a few years ago getting all of our services containerized. Since then we have not had a single full production…

> None of us are or want to be sysadmins.

It's such a huge misconception that by using a cloud provider you can avoid having "sysadmins" or don't need that kind of skills. You still need those, no matter which cloud and which service you use.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Really, I can't see a compelling reason to be in the cloud for the majority of mid-level workloads like ours. I work on a very small team. We have a few developers who double as ops. None of us are or want to be sysadmins. For our case, Amazon's ECS is a massive time and money saver. I spent a week or two a few years ago getting all of our services containerized. Since then we have not had a single full production…

> None of us are or want to be sysadmins. It's such a huge misconception that by using a cloud provider you can avoid having "sysadmins" or don't need that kind of skills. You still need those, no matter which cloud and which service you use.

In fact, if you're using Linux on your workstation you'll use the same skills locally as you do on the VPS/bare metal (depending on your scale.) Arguably "cloud" services need more sysadmin skills, not less.
Post reply on HN