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Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

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Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#201

Post by oauea »

deathanatos wrote: post #198
moring wrote: 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, ...?

The biggest problems: things don't work, things don't compose, and support is unknowledgeable & ineffective. Things don't work: outages, bugs. So many I'm not sure where to start: ACR: slow as molasses. I don't know why they didn't build it on blobstore. Many queries are clearly O(images) even when they shouldn't be. Throughput it terrible and made worse by inane pagination; listing images, for example, has a through…

> I need to write this all in a blog post.

Please do. It would be very valuable to find these things when searching about Azure, because this absolutely matches my experience.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#202

Post by bee_rider »

bootcat wrote: post #182
InflexHQ wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched from Azure to DigitalOcean to Hetzner. Reasons were as you stated, simpler cost model, simpler technology.

does hetzner have servers in US ? if not - if your app ok to be hosted in the EU ?

I was also wondering this so I just looked it up -- looks like they recently (well, Nov. 2021) expanded to Virginia.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#203

Post by anonymousDan »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #178
k8sToGo wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish Hetzner provided RDS

So it’s a bit in the future but managed postgres is something I want to offer through nimbus[0]. In the Meantime if you’re interested in other managed services, please sign up! [0]: https://nimbusws.com

Wow, never heard of Nimbus but the kickbacks for open source projects are an awesome idea - fair play.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#204

Post by justsomehnguy »

vidarh wrote: post #126
michealr wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Unfortunately not, but it's surprisingly straight-forward, apart from the database bit, but here's a bit more detail from memory. There are many ways of doing this and some will depend strongly on which tools you're comfortable with (e.g. nginx vs. haproxy vs. some other reverse proxy is largely down to which one you know best and/or already have in the mix) [Today I might have considered K8s, but this was before tha…

> If you want true zero-downtime migration there's a challenge

It is astounding how many people require 24/7 ops... while working 8/5.

Otherwise this comment is an exemplar on how things should be done. My take on this is what OP is a sysadmin, not a dev. *smug smile*

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#205

Post by lolinder »

kissgyorgy wrote: post #102
lolinder wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 produc…

You still need to do backups, a database backup is just one part of that, if you are not following the 3-2-1 rules and don't test your restore mechanism, you don't have reliable backups. Those things you listed are sill sysadmin tasks in my eyes, and you are doing them, validating my point. You still have to track storage space, either because you are paying for it and need to expand when necessary, or you have to ma…

I tell you that ECS has eliminated a ton of extra work for my team for a bargain price, and your response is "but you still have to do x, y, and z!" It's like saying that I shouldn't buy a dishwasher because I'd still have to wash the pots.

Yes, we still need to do some sysadmin-y tasks. But ECS handles so many of them that we actually have the time, energy, and knowledge to take care of the few that remain.

(As an aside, keeping language and OS versions up to date becomes a development task rather than an ops task when running Docker + ECS. We increment a version number in the repository and test everything, the same as we do for any library or framework that we depend on.)

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#206

Post by arka2147483647 »

judge2020 wrote: post #138
izacus wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Surely if they are that succesfull, they also have the resources to redesign/upgrade their backend?

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#207

Post by warent »

moooo99 wrote: post #116
Nextgrid wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cloud has normalized terrible underpowered VMs, so many new developers may just not be aware of how much performance a real dedicated machine has - even a relatively "mid range" one (i7 & 16 GB RAM).

This! I benchmarked a whole bunch of different cloud providers for fun (& my bachelor thesis) and was impressed by how bad some cloud VPS perform. Considering the really steep price to get any kind of significant memory/CPU resources with the major cloud providers as well as the steep bandwidth charges this little experiment was eye opening

Would be very interested in reading this thesis, my email is in my profile

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#208

Post by comprev »

I've done a few zero downtime migrations for clients, mostly due to the common story of the credits when they started out on coming to an end.

More often than not they realised a super dynamic cloud infrastructure was completely overkill for their business needs.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#209

Post by hardwaresofton »

anonymousDan wrote: post #203
hardwaresofton wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it’s a bit in the future but managed postgres is something I want to offer through nimbus[0]. In the Meantime if you’re interested in other managed services, please sign up! [0]: https://nimbusws.com

Wow, never heard of Nimbus but the kickbacks for open source projects are an awesome idea - fair play.

Thanks! It's not out yet :) I've been working on it for a bit and I really think this is what's missing from the hyperscaler/cloud model.

If we just put a LITTLE bit back into (like 5% of revenue for any of the big companies honestly -- but I'm not big yet so more for me) the F/OSS ecosystem, can you imagine what kind of world we'd be in??

I want to live in that world, so I'm trying to make it happen.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#210

Post by dijit »

netcoyote wrote: post #184
YorickPeterse wrote: post #117

At GitLab we went from AWS to Azure, then to Google Cloud (this was a few years ago). AWS was what we started with, and I think like most companies very little attention was paid to the costs, setup, etc. The result was that we were basically setting money on fire. I think at some point Azure announced $X in free credits for YC members, and GitLab determined this would save us something like a year's worth in bills (…

One of the things I'm immensely curious about is how you handle security/networking/firewalls when working with Hetzner or other bare metal providers? It seems they don't provide network gear for firewalls and to protect against DDOS attacks? Do you just use iptables? Or do you build out more complex solutions like software routers running on Linux/BSD? I work in online gaming, and we're constantly seeing attacks on…

Hey! I also make games and we solved the issue by doing stateless ACLs on the border switches and having a really fat pipe.

You can add a magic header to traffic and drop anything that doesn’t contain the header.

Since this is done in hardware it operates at line speed. In our case 100GBit/s.

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