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Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

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Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#261

Post by philliphaydon »

dx034 wrote: post #250
philliphaydon wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's technical debt if you may need to change your product because a third party makes changes. The beauty of software with little dependencies is that you can run decades old software on a system just fine with no need to regularly refactor. I know how tedious it is to maintain decades old enterprise Java software, but from a cost perspective, it makes much more sense to keep those rather than constantly refactor to…

> As an example, if you had a software that was written 20 years ago to store data in a relational DB, updating it to work with current versions of that database system won't be much work (if any). If you rely on managed services, I wouldn't be too sure that you get away that easy.

This very much depends. In the example you gave, nothing changes if you used managed services or not.

But you could argue that the 20yo software is technical debt preventing the upgrade of the database due to the source code being lost, the library used to connect to the latest version of the database doesn't exist requiring a rewrite in a moderm language or framework. Etc.

Technical debt really is about code that cannot easily be modified to adapt to the requirements of a business.

If you wrote some code, and it was trash, made no sense, in an obscure language that few people know, with no comments. Yet it ran for 10 years flawlessly with everyone too scared to look at it, but made the business money. It's not technical debt until it needs to be changed/modified.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#262

Post by InflexHQ »

bee_rider wrote: post #202
bootcat wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My business is based in the UK which is compatible with EU’s GDPR, so it’s fine to be hosted there.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#263

Post by dkechag »

greenail wrote: post #114
dkechag wrote: post #99

At work we moved from AWS to GCP for pricing reasons. We are still paying loads more than before moving to the cloud, but it's hard to find good sysadmins nowadays that don't want to do everything on the cloud. For personal projects I've moved things to Linode and Digital Ocean, as they provide quite decent value. Actually, for a comparison of AWS/GCP/Azure/Linode/DO/Tencent/Ali value & performance, check out an exte…

What is the difference in expense between the "loads more" you are spending and hiring and managing a sysadmin? Ballpark is fine, interested to know if it is 1x,10x, 50x?

So, we went from a cost of a bit over $3k/month for infrastructure, to almost $15k/month (would be more with AWS). Yes, you have to buy the servers, yourself at extra cost, but on Google most people run instances on Haswell/Skylake, which is >5 year old stuff, so a quick calculation for buying top of the line every 5 years (which for the first couple of years at least gives you faster hardware than on GCP) comes to about extra $2-3k/month. Also, we had 1 (very good) sysadmin and 1 other developer who assisted part-time sys-admining, to a cloud that has some extra bells and whistles, but requires 2 full-time sysadmins (we are temporarily left with 1 and he can't keep up). Part of the problem is that the whole architecture was very fine-tuned to run on our customized rack servers (it was doing happily for almost 15 years), so a lot of things did not translate that easily in the cloud. I guess if you have a small system, or designed from scratch for the cloud a single cloud platform person might be enough. Overall, there are some extra disadvantages beyond cost - e.g. Cloud SQL manages some things for you, but there is more lag compared to when our super fast DB server was on the same rack as the application servers, and other such little performance things that we could fine tune when we had control of the hardware.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#265

Post by intrepidsoldier »

eek2121 wrote: post #156

Yes, I moved a decent sized project from AWS to Digital Ocean. The biggest hurdles I had to deal with were the things Digital Ocean did NOT support. It was worth it in the end, because our bill went from millions of dollars a month to a few hundred thousand a month. Estimated labor cost was about a million.

Would love to learn more

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#266

Post by more_corn »

I ported a client from OVH to AWS with zero downtime. Built new infrastructure with terraform, flipped dns. Was easier than wading through the existing architecture fixing problems and security vulnerabilities.

It was a single web app though. Not too complicated.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#267

Post by bartread »

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!

Sure, but think about this: that little side project now has about 100x the traffic it did when my bill jumped.

That still isn't much traffic (at all) in the grand scheme of things, and Cloudflare's lowest paid tier deals with around 80% of the bandwidth. Still, it's not hard to imagine that bill blowing up to several hundred pounds per month had I chosen not to act. That would translate to several thousand pounds over the course of a year. I don't know very many people for whom such an expenditure, particularly if it's unnecessary and avoidable, would be something they'd regard as insignificant.

Putting it into everyday terms: it could have grown into my second largest outgoing after my mortgage. That doesn't really seem proportionate or sensible, so why wouldn't I look for a better deal?

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#268

Post by thatwasunusual »

xtracto wrote: post #192
milesward wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Dozen of decade+ billon+ customer contracts at this point make shutting GCP down a silly thought. Really crappy that the demos sucked tho, sorry :(

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2020/7/8/google-shut-down-... https://cloud.google.com/support/docs/shutdown Also, there have been plenty of Google products with paying customers that Google has shot down. At this point, I have 0 credibility in Google.

> Also, there have been plenty of Google products with paying customers that Google has shot down.

I highly doubt they will shut down a $5.5B business. Either way, because my applications are cloud-ready, it's easy to switch to another cloud provider again.

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