Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#151

Post by j0057 » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 4:25 PM UTC

lewisjoe wrote: post #150

I have a VM running on GCP. I have the world's simplest usecase: how do you export the instance as a snapshot so that I can run it from somewhere else. Say, a virtual box environment or another cloud provider. How do you export a snapshot of your disk and VM? Good luck searching for a solution. I just spent 2 hours trying to figure this out and it seems impossible :(

The general answer nowadays is "you don't": you spin up a new VM and provision it using whatever IaC/scripting solution works for you.

Edit to add: even if this were possible, it would be made exta challenging due to the cloud provider specific agents that are installed in VMs.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#152

Post by kakwa_ » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 4:25 PM UTC

Cipater wrote: post #130

bgorman wrote: post #115

Earlier 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?

Amazon sell a lot of stuff and consequently compete with a lot of legacy companies: Brick and mortar retail in nearly all fields (fashion, food, tools, appliance, books, etc), other online marketplaces (often with a mail order past) and even some tech companies.

Generally, companies are unwilling to give money to their competitor, reinforcing it.

They also might want to avoid some PR issues, as using your competitors product can lead to juicy stories depending on the situation/field.

If they are somewhat paranoid, they can also be reluctant to have their data accessible by their competitor (and I'm not talking DBs access there, even something like ELB logs can give valuable information, iirc such story did pop a few years)

Working for a marketing SaaS solution, requests from our clients to not be hosted on AWS are still quite common.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#153

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 4:28 PM UTC

Derelicts wrote: post #18

thatwasunusual wrote: post #3

Switched from Amazon to Google because I hate Amazon more than Google. Feature-wise, I'm just as happy. However, I trust Google more, but that probably boils to my hatred again. :)

I've done the same just with a different provider. And I see a trend, people go for the lesser evil out of the ones available.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#154

Post by zegerjan » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 4:56 PM UTC

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 (…

Azure to GCP was right after GV became an investor. Again, credits was the reason to change over. Not the poor Azure performance.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#155

Post by yonixw » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 5:42 PM UTC

milesward wrote: post #132

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…

Cloud Run works on all three major clouds, and VMWare, and Bare Metal. No lock-in here.

Do you mean GCP Cloud Run [1] ? I would love to have it on AWS and Azure if you have a link to share. Or do you mean it's possible, but through different services on each cloud?

[1] https://cloud.google.com/run

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#156

Post by eek2121 » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 5:53 PM UTC

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.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#157

Post by logifail » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 6:12 PM UTC

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #144

vidarh wrote: post #40

Yes. I once did zero downtime migration first from AWS to Google, then from Google to Hetzner for a client. Mostly for cost reasons: they had a lot of free credits, and moved to Hetzner when they ran out. Their savings from using the credits were at least 20x what the migrations cost. We did the migration by having reverse proxies in each environment that could proxy to backends each place, set up a VPN between them,…

We haven't done a cloud migration, but I know from zero-downtime DATABASE migrations that if you do this: - don't use any cloud service that isn't a packaged version of an installable/usable OSS project - architect your services to be able to double-write and switchover the read source with A/B deployments If you can migrate your database without downtime this way, then you are much more flexible than if not.

> architect your services to be able to double-write

Can you share any details on how to achieve this?

For instance, if the first database accepts the write but the second is temporarily inaccessible or throws an error, do you roll back the transaction on the first and throw an error, or ... ?

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#158

Post by renewiltord » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 6:15 PM UTC

Didn't, but went multi-cloud for performance reasons (we have to be close to the people we're talking to). The most annoying part was the network topology. Used DirectConnect with a provider so that x-cloud latency was as low as it could be. Overall, not too upset. Used terraform to configure things across clouds. Without that, would be too hard to keep track of everything.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#159

Post by 0x500x79 » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 6:22 PM UTC

I had a company that wanted to move from AWS to GCP. This was a top-down decision that was made with an incompetent "tech lead" stating that we could move everything and save money with the 10 year commit hundred million dollar contract in Google.

It failed, horrendously. Even though multiple people in the organization were calling out how bad of an idea it was they still moved forward. Google has some nicities with how things connect, setup, etc, but at the end of the day they are cloud providers and not everything they provide is a silver bullet.

This project was canceled after 3 years after spending millions on migrating since the migration was not a drop-in replacement (no one thought it was except the "tech lead").

There are a lot of things besides tech that can affect these projects. If you hire AWS experts and they are having to be AWS experts expect to need to hire GCP experts.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#160

Post by baq » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 6:24 PM UTC

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…

People get paid hard cash for lower quality plans than you’ve just provided, thanks a lot! :)