Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#81

Post by tomatowurst » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 1:56 PM UTC

dx034 wrote: post #38

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 signific…

can you share more details, because im in teh process of doing the same since having a few terabytes of postgresql / dynamodb is stupid expensive.

for a lot big organizations its a matter of accountability. if they say AWS went down vs our dedicated servers went down, it matters a lot for insurance, clients.

what i dont get are 4 man startups paying thousands to AWS ... because everybody does it.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#82

Post by philliphaydon » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 1:57 PM UTC

dx034 wrote: post #42

bombcar wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm still not a fan of the second way. If you develop all your software to tightly integrate with AWS, you might save time developing the software but create a huge amount of technical debt. Managing your own infrastructure (with dedicated servers, so no hardware management) isn't too hard, even if you're a small shop. And managing a fleet of AWS services isn't necessarily less work. Maybe there's a reason all ads fo…

It’s not technical debt if it’s making you money. I would much rather solve the business problems than managing services myself.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#83

Post by k101 » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 1:57 PM UTC

We decided on a multi-cloud infrastructure. Now the team is thinking about choosing a tool that would allow you to migrate and do multi-cloud in two clicks. We try to go to not very large clouds, because first we want to support small businesses, and secondly, sometimes it is more convenient for regional legislation. The main clouds are Scaleway, DigitalOcean and your own servers.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#84

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 1:58 PM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #66

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…

> 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…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#85

Post by joncrane » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 1:58 PM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #66

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…

> 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…

"Infrastructure is cheaper than developers(sysadmins)" all over again.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#86

Post by lolinder » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 1:59 PM UTC

kissgyorgy wrote: post #79

lolinder wrote: post #66

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.

Which skills specifically do you think we might be missing that we would need to run an app on a managed container service and managed database?

I know how to configure firewalls, set up a (managed) load balancer, manage DNS, and similar tasks directly related to getting traffic to my app.

What I no longer have to know how to do: keep track of drive space, manage database backups, install security updates on a production server without downtime, rotate SSH keys, and a whole bunch of other tasks adjacent to the app but not actually visible to incoming traffic at all.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#87

Post by mjb152 » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 2:00 PM UTC

tinco wrote: post #51

yonixw wrote: post #48

In my company, we were aware about the potential honeypots in each cloud and we developed our product from the first commit to be deployed on 3 (!) clouds: AWS, Azure, IBM. And while we made it work by sticking to the least common denominator which was FaaS/IaaS (Lambda, S3, API GW, K8s). It was certainly not easy. We also ignored tools that could've helped us greatly only against a single cloud in order to be multi…

Why did you feel IBM is best when you only use K8S? Our platform fully K8S and I'm looking to somewhere where we get more performance per buck, probably not IBM but I'm surprised it's even in the list. Do they have an extra nice K8S dashboard or something?

I'd throw in stability, IAM, storage and the management plane.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#88

Post by lolinder » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 2:00 PM UTC

exfascist wrote: post #80

kissgyorgy wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's far easier to maintain my own Linux workstation than an internet-facing server used daily by customers.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#89

Post by cbushko » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 2:01 PM UTC

Yes. I built an entire new platform on Google Cloud using Kubernetes (GKE). We moved from AWS.

It was a chance to re-architect the platform, make things simpler and cost effective. Huge success on all of those. Costs were reduced by millions a year.

Other than GKE, there was not a significant technology reason to move to Google Cloud. AWS didn't even have a managed version of Kubernetes at the time.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#90

Post by cnj » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 2:02 PM UTC

Yes. We migrated from Rackspace to GCP. When I joined the company, it was clear Rackspace was loosing the cloud race, but back in 2012/2013 it was a strong contender.

Sometimes one adopts a technology too early...

We had a longer selection process between AWS, GCP and Azure. AWS was difficult because some of our customers see Amazon as a competitor. However today we also offer the option to run on AWS. GCP won over Azure.