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Ask HN: Beyond AWS/Azure/GCP, what cloud providers should I know more about?

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61–70 of 105 posts

Re: Ask HN: Beyond AWS/Azure/GCP, what cloud providers should I know more about?

#61

Alibaba Cloud. Although, my dealings with them have been entirely negative. Their strategy is to make a clone of every service AWS has, except the billing system which hides a lot of majorly expensive pitfalls. Also, if you choose one of their mainland hosted zones, trying to get your data out is even more expensive than the other zones. So in this case, "knowing more about" is really "tread carefully".

Your caution is well received -- thank you!

Re: Ask HN: Beyond AWS/Azure/GCP, what cloud providers should I know more about?

#62
post #20

Kubernetes + Cluster API. This unlocks the ability to use one or multiple providers: https://cluster-api.sigs.k8s.io/reference/providers.html * Alibaba Cloud * AWS * Azure * Azure Stack HCI * Baidu Cloud * BYOH * Metal3 * DigitalOcean * Exoscale * GCP * Hetzner * IBM Cloud * KubeVirt * MAAS * Nested * Nutanix * OpenStack * Equinix Metal (formerly Packet) * Sidero * Tencent Cloud * vSphere

Also Oracle OCI has OKE, which is Oracle Kubernetes Engine. It works nicely and the quality of service has been very good in my experience over the past four years. Disclaimer: I currently work at Oracle.

Can you find anyone who doesn't work at Oracle that can back up this bold assertion?

Re: Ask HN: Beyond AWS/Azure/GCP, what cloud providers should I know more about?

#63
I realize some folks have a fairly negative view, hell I still have it, but Oracle OCI has been surprisingly sane. When you break out of the mindset that "this should work this way because that's how AWS does it", it's actually quite refreshing.

Their serverless support story (Oracle Functions) is pretty clunky, but for standing up instances, and the terraform provider is quite verbose, but when it works, it works in a sane and logical manner.

Re: Ask HN: Beyond AWS/Azure/GCP, what cloud providers should I know more about?

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Oracle OCI has OKE, which is Oracle Kubernetes Engine. It works nicely and the quality of service has been very good in my experience over the past four years. Disclaimer: I currently work at Oracle.

Can you find anyone who doesn't work at Oracle that can back up this bold assertion?

I’m sure that can be put into some company’s next Oracle licensing true up.

Re: Ask HN: Beyond AWS/Azure/GCP, what cloud providers should I know more about?

#65
post #19

Unless you consider it essential for your product to scale by few orders of magnitude on a dime, it would be sensible to add "non-cloud" hosting into consideration - Hetzner, OVH, Scaleway, ... Those are considerably cheaper, suffer less from unpredictable performance, a.k.a. "loud neighbour" problem, and are less likely to make you lock into some API/feature that would become a huge headache if you ever decide to mo…

We had a lot of noisy neighbour issues on Hetzner's VPSes, to the point that we stopped using them entirely. Their bare metal is a great offer though. And fully agreed about lock-in. If you can, design cloud-agnostic from the start. You get a lot more flexibility and you're in a much better negotiating position as you grow. Not realistic or necessarily sensible for every company/team though.

I'm a happy Hetzner baremetal (and OVH) user, just don't use Hetzner's Finland DC, the network is very unpredictable (a lot of random packet loss).

Re: Ask HN: Beyond AWS/Azure/GCP, what cloud providers should I know more about?

#67

Unless you consider it essential for your product to scale by few orders of magnitude on a dime, it would be sensible to add "non-cloud" hosting into consideration - Hetzner, OVH, Scaleway, ... Those are considerably cheaper, suffer less from unpredictable performance, a.k.a. "loud neighbour" problem, and are less likely to make you lock into some API/feature that would become a huge headache if you ever decide to mo…

Scaleway isn't really non-cloud. Their services are very similar to EC2, S3, Glacier etc. I would compare them more with Digital Ocean. They're just cheaper and you can actually chat with them on slack without going to all the 'raise a ticket' rigmarole that all the big players do. At work I deal with Microsoft's double-outsourced "premium" support which is awful. If the question is not in the docs (in which case I would have found it myself) tickets keep ping-ponging for months without solution, going through the same useless troubleshooting over and over because they keep handing over to different agents.

I use scaleway privately only but very happy with them. I wish I had their kind of support from the vendors at work. You can often try out upcoming services for free, too.

Hetzner wants a copy of your ID which I was not willing to provide so I couldn't try them. Germans are normally really privacy-conscious so this surprised me. This was > 10 years ago though so perhaps they stopped this practice.

Re: Ask HN: Beyond AWS/Azure/GCP, what cloud providers should I know more about?

#68

I realize some folks have a fairly negative view, hell I still have it, but Oracle OCI has been surprisingly sane. When you break out of the mindset that "this should work this way because that's how AWS does it", it's actually quite refreshing. Their serverless support story (Oracle Functions) is pretty clunky, but for standing up instances, and the terraform provider is quite verbose, but when it works, it works in…

OCI support is actively the most unhelpful and useless waste of time I've had the displeasure of spending this year.

As an added bonus they will randomly nuke accounts and production servers without even a curtsey email.

I won't even take on clients if they are using OCI.

Re: Ask HN: Beyond AWS/Azure/GCP, what cloud providers should I know more about?

#69
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oracle Cloud - good alternative for bandwidth heavy products (used by Zoom) please don't. I have nothing but the worst experiences with Oracle Cloud. Granted, I was always a little biased against Oracle as a company; but I have a friend working on OCI and assumed that since what I needed was really basic it would be fine. It really wasn't, it was awful, confusing and opaquely and egregiously expensive.

> It really wasn't, it was awful, confusing and opaquely and egregiously expensive. That is true, but it is also very much an understatement of just how miserable every step of the OC experience is. I was once forced by a customer to endure the torture that is OC, and the only thing that saved me was when Oracle's terrible management software just deleted our entire account and deployment one weekend. Gone without a…

I won't even take on clients if they are using OCI now.

I've had previous clients whos entire account with production servers just get nuked without even so much as a curtsey email and OCI support WILL NOT HELP.

Re: Ask HN: Beyond AWS/Azure/GCP, what cloud providers should I know more about?

#70

Twilio, Stripe, Notion

Agree on stripe as well as crm tool. Good thing about aws (and I’m sure others) is you can ride on their soc2 report, security is a huge concern when selling a SaaS tool and when buyers hear aws they assume you’ll pass security no prob, others, ymmv and you’ll have more work to do.
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