I've helped around 900 companies make the switch (others to GCP in my case), and I can confirm based on their results over time that the differences are not as small as they might seem. For so many, it's just ease of use and efficiency to get things done; for others its attention and partnership; for a third cohort its absurd cost advantages; and a fourth its performance and reliability. Our customers see gaps in one or many of those four areas? They move.
Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?
131–140 of 268 posts
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?
#132In 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…
Cloud Run works on all three major clouds, and VMWare, and Bare Metal. No lock-in here.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?
#133Earlier 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.
If you use purely PaaS offerings (or FaaS as well), then you also don't really need sysadmins.
That's not to say that you can get away with knowing _no_ sysadmin skills in these scenarios, but you don't need to have someone on staff who knows the ins and outs of Cassandra or Mongo or whatever you're using. In awful workplaces with high turnover, it's worth it for management to opt for these managed services so that when the overworked tech lead decides to rightfully bail on them, she/he doesn't leave them in the lurch. (Note: I'm not defending these workplaces, but just explaining that when they can't keep adequate in-house talent to manage their own services, it makes financial sense to outsource it, and pay the "cloud tax").
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
> to OVH AI Docker. Can't find an OVH product by that name (would have surprised me), is this a buzzword bingo joke?
I searched for exactly those 3 words on Duckduckgo.com and got https://docs.ovh.com/us/en/publiccloud/ai/training/build-use... which is a tutorial for what I use.
Docker and AI are technologies used on the OVH host, it's not part of the product itself...
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?
#135We did, a few times. Only because many of them had generous credits for early stage startups. GCP, Azure, SoftLayer (now IBM Cloud), DigitalOcean. We weren't relying on any particular service except managed Kubernetes, but we were happy to set it up overselves if it wasn't on offer.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?
#136There have been two circumstances where we’ve seriously thought about it, but as of yet haven’t changed:
1) Under some circumstances we might want to give very stringent uptime guarantees for some systems, and I do not trust providers to have zero global (cross AZ) outages. Having a hot standby or even load balancing across clouds could be tempting.
2) One cloud provider is very keen to get into our sector and has made extremely generous overtures which we’d be silly to completely ignore.
As I say, not something we’ve followed through as yet but both are serious considerations.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?
#137Yes. I got a new job at a new company.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But most companies' dream is to reach that ""inevitable"" point where the cloud saves it; it becomes a bet where they either reach that level of scale, or die trying.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I concur, in my experience the biggest driver of growth for Azure and GCP is that customers of SASS companies and consulting companies make it a requirement to choose anyone but AWS. Legacy companies are terrified of Amazon. Google does have some innovative big data products like BigQuery and Dataflow. In general choosing GCP over AWS shouldn't hinder a companies growth at this point IMO.
>customers of SASS companies and consulting companies make it a requirement to choose anyone but AWS. Legacy companies are terrified of Amazon. Is there a particular reason for this?
Apparently Walmart and Target stay away from AWS but most of it seems to be FUD regarding, I guess, Amazon potentially targeting their competitors and their suppliers to steal data stored in AWS/use it for strategic business moves. It would be a swift death for AWS if they were found to be doing this, though, so imo the fear is unfounded.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/andriacheng/2019/07/14/amazon-a...
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?
#140Moved from AWS to vultr. Primary reason is unsafe billing practices at AWS. I'm a small shop and felt very uncomfortable about the potential of getting a surprise $xx,000 bill from AWS. The hack in December tripled my anxiety. Changed my password and migrated in January. Closed out my AWS account once every last service was migrated. I mostly use only basic services so pretty much any cloud provider can fit my use ca…
> The hack in December
What are you referring to?