Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 268 posts

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#111

Post by StreamBright »

alberth wrote: post #35
StreamBright wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One phrase: right sizing. The original infra on OVH used an instance type that was suboptimal for the workload. Because re-provisioning was not an option due to the size of the cluster, especially without moving hard drives we had only one option. Move the data to S3, find the right instance type and switch over. The ability to right size your infra is grossly underrated. Decoupling data from compute too. We are talk…

Would you mind sharing what size instance types you were on at OVH and are on now at AWS. I ask because I've found that even radically larger sized OVH hardware is still way less expensive than AWS.

At the time (many years ago) the largest instance type of OVH was used because that had the required disc capacity that the customer needed. On AWS S3 has a vastly different cost structure and the fact that you can use whatever instance type for your workload enabled us to save up this much. We could use some low spec m5.* instance type that was running with 80% CPU utilization for the workload and also we could use fewer instances.

To re-iterate:

- the most cost saving comes from the fact that we could de-couple storage from compute

- the second part of the cost saving came from the fact that we could use fewer instances with lower spec

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#112

Post by StreamBright »

dx034 wrote: post #49
StreamBright wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One phrase: right sizing. The original infra on OVH used an instance type that was suboptimal for the workload. Because re-provisioning was not an option due to the size of the cluster, especially without moving hard drives we had only one option. Move the data to S3, find the right instance type and switch over. The ability to right size your infra is grossly underrated. Decoupling data from compute too. We are talk…

So you saved money because you optimized the structure, not because of the provider? I guess you would've saved more rebuilding it on OVH?

Reread what I wrote. It could not have been rebuilt because for the rebuild you need to duplicate the data stored that was 1PB+.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#113

Post by odonnellryan »

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.

I think the problem with cloud environments is you do not "need" sysadmins - it is not obvious you need them, so what you end up with is a bunch of systems glued together without much thought, and then crazy things like HTTP logs not being turned on for your various services, insane service costs b/c of not understanding pricing tiers, etc..

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#114

Post by greenail »

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?

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#115

Post by bgorman »

busterarm wrote: post #73

AWS to Google Cloud. Already mature product (public company). Many potential customers are strongly Amazon-averse. Switching to GCP won some deals that were being lost otherwise. Anybody's cloud strategy should try and stick to the most basic services/building-blocks possible (containers/vms, storage, databases, queues, load balancers, dns, etc) to facilitate multi-cloud and/or easy switching. Not that each cloud doe…

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.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#116

Post by moooo99 »

Nextgrid wrote: post #96
10000truths wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, but honestly, a single dedicated server should easily be able to handle a million users, for most CRUD apps.

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

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#117

Post by YorickPeterse »

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 (quite a bit of money at the time). Moving over was rather painful, and I think in the months that we used Azure literally nobody was happy with it. In addition, I recall we burned through the free credits _very_ fast.

I don't recall the exact reasoning for switching to GCP, but I do recall it being quite a challenging process that took quite some time. Our experiences with GCP were much better, but I wouldn't call it perfect. In particular, GCP had/has a tendency to just randomly terminate VMs for no clear reason whatsoever. Sometimes they would terminate cleanly, other times they would end up in a sort of purgatory/in between state, resulting in other systems still trying to connect to them but eventually timing out, instead of just erroring right away. IIRC over time we got better at handling it, but it felt very Google-like to me to just go "Something broke, but we'll never tell you why".

Looking back, if I were to start a company I'd probably stick with something like Hetzner or another affordable bare metal provider. Cloud services are great _if_ you use their services to the fullest extend possible, but I suspect for 90% of the cases it just ends up being a huge cost factor, without the benefits making it worth it.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#118

Post by ChasingEchoes »

phillu wrote: post #37
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.

That's something I find so fascinating. The "cloud" will almost always be more expensive and "not worth it" if you are only using the IaaS services. I mean, look at the numbers, everyone sees that. Cloud only ever is worth it when one uses the higher-tier services, like AWS Lambda and the likes. Even running Kubernetes in the cloud is only semi worth it, because it's not high enough in the stack and still touches too…

the problem as many have already pointed out around this thread, is that, in an enterprise env. you cant really do that too much anymore. And as a result that starts being felt by non-enterprise shops too.

And you cant really do that because people dont really wanna deal with on-prem shit and server hostings

Tehnically speaking, i am rhcsa certified, i know how to do all of this on-prem, hybrid things. I dont even bother looking at job offers from companies that arent cloud based (even if i would get a 10-15% increase, or more if coming from the financial sector) because, i genuinely cant be arsed to deal with all that bullshit again.

I'm done with caring about disk space, and hw firewalls and configuring bs in linux. Fuck iptables, let me manage everything from a (network) security group. Fuck Traefik and F5 and all this bs, let me just plop an Application Gatway in Azure or API gateway in AWS. Fuck database clusters. At this point, i havent even configured an apache/nginx server in a couple of years. WebApps in Azure are more than fine; and for the rest K8s.

As a result, good "classic" sysadmins are a dying breed even at enterprise level. So they're even more rare and accessible for small/medium sized business. If i go to my IT dept. right now, i can guarantee 80% of them would be completely lost to setup and use an AD, AAD is just too convenient.

That basically leaves you with: move to cloud, or learn how to do all of these things by yourself. And those things take time (to learn and to manage)

It's like deciding to make apps with Perl. Can you do it? sure. But you'll probably have to do it on your own.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#119

Post by fxtentacle »

Aachen wrote: post #110
fxtentacle wrote: post #4

Amazon EC2 to OVH AI Docker. Price for GPU instances went down 80%.

> 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.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#120

Post by topicseed »

gitgud wrote: post #103
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…

Also cold start times for serverless differ greatly between those cloud providers. AWS is < 1 second, whereas Google Cloud is 5-10 seconds

None of my workloads (5x Cloud Run services, 10's of Functions) have anywhere near 5s cold starts. More like 2s with network latency.
Post reply on HN