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Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

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Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#21

Post by acapybara »

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…

+1 on dedicated server. It's so much simpler & cost effective than the cloud.

10 big dedicated servers can probably handle the same load as 100s to 1000s of cloud nodes for a fraction of the cost. Configuration and general complexity might even be simpler without the cloud.

It's not as hard as people make it out to be to set up backup and redundancy/failover.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#22

Post by heywire »

I know of several retailers and companies serving retailers that switched away from AWS around the time they bought Whole Foods. Before our company switched away, we had multiple retailers say that they would not use our services hosted by one of their biggest competitors.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#23

Post by flumpcakes »

moring wrote: post #14
oauea wrote: post #5

Yes, switched from AWS to Google to Azure. Don't switch to Azure unless your employer forces you, you will regret it. Google is great on a technical level though, especially if you do things with Kubernetes.

> 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, ...?

In my experience a lot of difficultly with Azure arises because a business is probably already using Azure to manage it's IT infrastructure.

You then get into sticky situations where IT are unhappy handing over admin access to the Ops teams: for example refusing access to AAD because it is integrated with the _corporate_ domain.

This might seem fine on the surface, it's just a people issue, but it can become very tiresome when dealing with Azure resources their permissions.

Worse still is some Azure resources use AAD almost like a data store: such as b2b and b2c. If you have write back enabled on your AAD (as most companies would - otherwise users wouldn't be able to self service forgotten passwords) you will _apparently_ clog up the on-premise domain with foreign objects from your b2b configuration.

Of course you can get around all of this by having a separate tenant in Azure for SaaS teams/Ops only. But you introduce the headache of management (should both tenants be under a super enterprise tenant?) and single sign on (security might say there is only one user login for everything with RBAC & MFA managed from one place... now you have to join the tenants somehow...)

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#24

Post by dsr_ »

jenscow wrote: post #15
warent wrote: post #6

Switched from GCP to my own server hardware. After doing the math it came out that it would pay for itself in less than a year. Depending on individual usecase, cloud can be prohibitively expensive and running a server for a small business really isn't nearly as hard as they'd have you believe

Yes, but what about the million new customers you're going to get next week?

Having plans for what to do in case of a success disaster is good. Spending in expectation of having a success disaster can be disastrous.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#25

Post by yardie »

lysecret wrote: post #12
someelephant wrote: post #9

I'd be surprised if more small businesses hadn't, the credits sales people are willing to give you are massive

Yea, that is also my experience working mostly in startups. I wonder if they will keep up this credit strategy.

I've bounced between AWS, Azure, and GCP. Once they get entrenched enough the credits stop but right now it's GCP with the best incentives.

Also, don't sleep on Oracle. Their cloud platform is stupidly competitive price-wise but limited feature-wise. If you're just looking for basic compute and storage they can't be beat, sans credits.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#26

Post by hpeinar »

Moved a project with around 600k monthly users from Heroku / Google (split setup) to full AWS setup.

Whole process took around 3 months, that was from start of creating AWS account to finish when all production environments were running on AWS and Heroku was "shut down". There was some planning ahead of this as well, so actual time varies.

Heroku was heavily limiting platform (for example, they didn't and still don't support http2) and we needed more control over our infrastructure to support further growth without paying enormous costs (for example, redis prices in Heroku are just mind-blowing).

Also as we were about to open few new markets, Heroku would have required a lot of manual work to get everything working, something which is really, really simple with Kubernetes.

Our monthly costs did go up vs what we had at Heroku at that time, but we're getting a lot more control and bang out of the buck.

Regarding convincing stakeholders, you really need to have good reasons to do it. These kind of switches are not cheap nor easy and come with bunch of risks. The easiest thing to sell is always pricing, but in that case you have to show calculations (big guys like AWS and Google have pretty decent calculators you could use) which show the switch is worth it.

As I was moving from small player (Heroku) to a big player (AWS) I also had other good reasons (better CI, better logging, better performance overview, more control in general). So it really improved a lot of things for the developers, devops and users.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#27

Post by eric4smith »

Moved from Google Cloud -> Digital Ocean -> OVH.

Running our own stuff on high powered servers is very easy and less trouble than you think. Sorted out the deploy with a "git push" and build container(s) meant we could just "Set it and forget it".

We have a bit under a terabyte of Postgresql data. Any cloud is prohibitively expensive.

I think some people think that the cloud is as good a sliced bread. It does not really save any developer time.

But it's slower and more expensive than your own server by a huge margin. And I can always do my own stuff on my own iron. Really, I can't see a compelling reason to be in the cloud for the majority of mid-level workloads like ours.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#28

Post by StreamBright »

alberth wrote: post #11
StreamBright wrote: post #7

From OVH to AWS. 30% TCO reduction. This was before the fire.

I’m really curious how this math adds up given how inexpensive OVH is. Other people in this exact thread are saying they experienced an 80% cost reduction by moving from AWS to OVH. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30943058

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 talking about hundreds of nodes.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#30

Post by bombcar »

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…

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.

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