Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

There's a little company called Microsoft. Word on the street is they are averaging one new data centre a week now. Although a bit behind AWS they are exceptional at copying market leaders and are getting some good traction with folks like Adobe.

Seriously, worth a look if you need a solid alternative to AWS.

If you are located in North America, I would suggest looking at Storm On Demand [1] (the unmanaged offering of LiquidWeb).

They offer more bare services than AWS but they provide:

- Virtual Machines with many configurations available (on shared host or dedicated host)

- Private Cloud

- Private LAN with close to sub-millisecond latency

- Automated backup, snapshots

- API

- Load Balancer

- CDN (backed by Akamai)

- Block Storage (but I found it too slow for our needs)

- Different levels of managed hosting

LiquidWeb has even more options, but you usually need to pay for managed hosting (they throw in tons of free bandwidth though).

Support is really good: of course you sometimes end up speaking with someone who is clueless or overworked, but it is extremely rare and most support people are knowledgeable, helpful, and quick. We migrated a legacy VM with old cpanel and drupal sites and even though Drupal is not in their main expertise, they optimized the heck out of the configs and the sites are running twice as fast as before on weaker hardware.

Uptime is excellent: as opposed to Google or Amazon, they do everything in their power to keep the physical host and the VMs up and connected. In other words, they have a single host SLA (Amazon and Google's SLA only applies for multi-AZ outages if I remember correctly). They also built their own datacenters and are not collocating or renting someone else's datacenter.

Performance of their SSD VMs is better than Linode's and DO's VMs in our internal benchmarks.

If you need more than a few VMs, contacting Sales is a really good idea because they can make you some interesting offers.

The main downside for us is that they are located in central US so latency is not ideal for our eastern Canada customer base.

FWIW, we moved all our VMs from Linode to Storm because we lost confidence in Linode (DDOS, security, lack of transparency) even though the ratio performance/cost/reliability (in Newark, before the DDOS incident) was impossible to beat.

[1] https://www.stormondemand.com/

I am using a few dedicated servers and Rancher (container platform). This way it is magnitudes cheaper than AWS and probably as easy to use. You can also avoid "cloud lock-in" when you start like this.

I think Google Cloud Platform looks solid. Their alternative to EC2 is Google Compute Engine.

If you want stuff taken care of for you, Google App Engine is great. I'll note that I haven't deployed anything to production, only played around with it for fun. The flexible environment is still in beta, so it doesn't provide any SLAs. For a large serious production project that's a big factor to consider. If it's a small app, I think the "magic" is worth it. But I've only hacked together toy node APIs for SPAs.

For data storage, Cloud Datastore looks great. If it seemed to fit my problem, I'd probably go with that. The big problem with that is vendor lock-in. It has an emulator for testing and development. If you had to migrate away from it, I think AppScale [0] has an open source alternative, but I'm unable to vouch for its quality. If I were creating a serious long-term project, a Postgres instance on RDS would probably be my other choice. Google has Cloud SQL, but my experience with MySQL hasn't been as pleasant as with Postgres. I don't know how they compare "at scale".

In my job we use AWS in production, and I've slowly learned my way around it. I'd say I'm still a total beginner with AWS. Although I've only used GCP "for fun", from my limited experience and my perspective as an application developer, it seems more easily approachable / accessible.

[0] https://github.com/AppScale/appscale

This is exactly what I do and I have had 100% uptime for the last two years.