6 ms·

Been happening daily for about 5 days now. Pretty frustrating but I'm sure it's frustrating for them too. Thinking about moving to Google Compute Engine instea

Been happening daily for about 5 days now. Pretty frustrating but I'm sure it's frustrating for them too. Thinking about moving to Google Compute Engine instead.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
empressplay 11y ago
I worry that moving to a larger company will just hasten the consolidation of hosting to a few players.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - nothrabannosir 11y ago
    He(/she?) never said he wouldn't do it, just that it worried him. Back seat doesn't mean thrown out of the car. People need to keep bringing this up, lest we completely forget about it and wake up when it's too late.
- swiley 11y ago
  The best thing for reliability is to use multiple companies. AWS has proved that multiple times.
  - yeukhon 11y ago
    Disagree. It is hard to maintain codebase and consistent infrastructure setup for multiple providers. Amazon's m3.medium != some vendor's m3.medium. Network setup and configuration are also nightmare. Speaking from experience dealing with four cloud vendors at once. It sounds great from a textbook perspective, but unless you are ready to spend millions every year to fight fire, please don't do that. If you were to use AWS, please build on multiple regions.
    - mwcampbell 11y ago
      I have a hard time imagining how supporting multiple providers would cost millions of dollars per year. I think it's a worthwhile way to make your software and infrastructure more resilient. And it protects you from vendor lock-in. As long as you keep things simple and don't use features that are only implemented by one provider, VMs are basically interchangeable.
      - yeukhon 11y ago
        Human capital cost. Also, infrastructure is expensive by nature. We managed to run four at once with a team of 12 people. As I said before, vendor X ~= vendor Y in some way, so your deal and the service you get are not the same, so there is cost associated with that also. There is a reason to pick a good strong vendor and stick with it. Big names end up building their own data center (they can probably capx it for tax purpose). Small to medium usually don't have time to deal with multiple vendors. Try to be vendor agnostic is really great but again, even in the world of open stack, you either manage all of your open stack installation yourself (which is expensive), or you end up one vendor running one version behind, or not offering 100% feature. I think it is more worthwhile to first complete automation and self-healing in one vendor, before thinking leaping to another one. It took so many engineers at Netflix to build a resilient AWS environments. VMs go down all the time, more often than AWS pushing some bad commits and cause half of their native services go down. There is so much more to engineer in other areas and those are more likely to put you out of service first, so unless you want to all your team dealing with fires every day.... we were putting band-aids together most of the time.
        Dylan16807 11y ago
        12 people whose sole, full-time job is to install the same OS on multiple vendors and make the networks look the same? I'm having trouble imagining what problems have to be constantly dealt with such that multiple millions of dollars have to go into abstracting the multiple vendors.
        11y ago
  - albertoleal 11y ago
    How does one set up to use multiple vendors?
    - ryanlol 11y ago
      You buy servers from multiple different companies, you install software on them.
      - albertoleal 11y ago
        Anyone can do that. I was actually wondering if there are software to automate this.
        ryanlol 11y ago
        Openstack might allow you to do this. (I haven't used it myself.)
        ultramancool 11y ago
        Ansible is probably the best bet - once you have SSH it'll pretty much work with anything and it also has support for creation of servers on several cloud providers and stuff. We use it for automatic configuration of everything from colocated hardware to $5/mo VMs on DigitalOcean and other low-cost virtual server providers and it works great.
        rubiquity 11y ago
        You could use something like Terraform to help automate this. It's like CloudFormation but also supports GCE, Azure, DigitalOcean, etc. 0 - https://terraform.io/ https://terraform.io/
    - mcone 11y ago
      You might consider taking a look at http://www.cloud66.com/ http://www.cloud66.com/
      - doublerebel 11y ago
- beachstartup 11y ago
  this is going to happen no matter what - the rate of consolidation in my opinion is actually accelerating. despite what anyone says, the vast majority of people choose their hosting provider in order to "not get fired", i.e. they are extremely risk-averse, to the point of irrationality, even when presented with massive savings, better service, better underlying hardware and network, and more transparency. most of the time they are spending someone else's money, also. you should see some of the deals that have come across my desk. the 'big names' can literally charge 2-5x more than a competitive quote and get away with it, oftentimes with worse deliverables (i.e. long stretches of downtime that somehow get a pass from their customers). at the end of the day it's a server sitting in a rack in a datacenter, connected to ethernet. beyond a certain level of quality (tier 3 dc, server class hardware, an enterprise quality network) it's really all the same. people should choose their hosting provider on 1. quality of implementation 2. price and 3. whether or not the provider actually gives a shit about you and your account, but they usually just go with the name, like many other markets.
  - yeukhon 11y ago
    > most of the time they are spending someone else's money, also. you should see some of the deals that have come across my desk. the 'big names' can literally charge 2-5x more than a competitive quote and get away with it, oftentimes with worse deliverables (i.e. long stretches of downtime that somehow get a pass from their customers). Even AWS can charge you big time. As I am getting more and more familiar with AWS every day, the #1 thing on my list going forward is to to sit down with your TAM and organize architecture review. There are services on AWS lacking completeness and can bite you in the end if you go straight with it without knowing what you are getting into. Disclaimer: I like AWS pretty well.
jedicoffee 11y ago
:(

Been happening daily for about 5 days now. Pretty frustrating but I'm sure it's frustrating for them too. Thinking about moving to Google Compute Engine instead.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

empressplay 11y ago

I worry that moving to a larger company will just hasten the consolidation of hosting to a few players.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- nothrabannosir 11y ago
  He(/she?) never said he wouldn't do it, just that it worried him. Back seat doesn't mean thrown out of the car. People need to keep bringing this up, lest we completely forget about it and wake up when it's too late.
swiley 11y ago
The best thing for reliability is to use multiple companies. AWS has proved that multiple times.
- yeukhon 11y ago
  Disagree. It is hard to maintain codebase and consistent infrastructure setup for multiple providers. Amazon's m3.medium != some vendor's m3.medium. Network setup and configuration are also nightmare. Speaking from experience dealing with four cloud vendors at once. It sounds great from a textbook perspective, but unless you are ready to spend millions every year to fight fire, please don't do that. If you were to use AWS, please build on multiple regions.
  - mwcampbell 11y ago
    I have a hard time imagining how supporting multiple providers would cost millions of dollars per year. I think it's a worthwhile way to make your software and infrastructure more resilient. And it protects you from vendor lock-in. As long as you keep things simple and don't use features that are only implemented by one provider, VMs are basically interchangeable.
    - yeukhon 11y ago
      Human capital cost. Also, infrastructure is expensive by nature. We managed to run four at once with a team of 12 people. As I said before, vendor X ~= vendor Y in some way, so your deal and the service you get are not the same, so there is cost associated with that also. There is a reason to pick a good strong vendor and stick with it. Big names end up building their own data center (they can probably capx it for tax purpose). Small to medium usually don't have time to deal with multiple vendors. Try to be vendor agnostic is really great but again, even in the world of open stack, you either manage all of your open stack installation yourself (which is expensive), or you end up one vendor running one version behind, or not offering 100% feature. I think it is more worthwhile to first complete automation and self-healing in one vendor, before thinking leaping to another one. It took so many engineers at Netflix to build a resilient AWS environments. VMs go down all the time, more often than AWS pushing some bad commits and cause half of their native services go down. There is so much more to engineer in other areas and those are more likely to put you out of service first, so unless you want to all your team dealing with fires every day.... we were putting band-aids together most of the time.
      - Dylan16807 11y ago
        12 people whose sole, full-time job is to install the same OS on multiple vendors and make the networks look the same? I'm having trouble imagining what problems have to be constantly dealt with such that multiple millions of dollars have to go into abstracting the multiple vendors.
        11y ago
- albertoleal 11y ago
  How does one set up to use multiple vendors?
  - ryanlol 11y ago
    You buy servers from multiple different companies, you install software on them.
    - albertoleal 11y ago
      Anyone can do that. I was actually wondering if there are software to automate this.
      - ryanlol 11y ago
        Openstack might allow you to do this. (I haven't used it myself.)
      - ultramancool 11y ago
        Ansible is probably the best bet - once you have SSH it'll pretty much work with anything and it also has support for creation of servers on several cloud providers and stuff. We use it for automatic configuration of everything from colocated hardware to $5/mo VMs on DigitalOcean and other low-cost virtual server providers and it works great.
      - rubiquity 11y ago
        You could use something like Terraform to help automate this. It's like CloudFormation but also supports GCE, Azure, DigitalOcean, etc. 0 - https://terraform.io/ https://terraform.io/
  - mcone 11y ago
    You might consider taking a look at http://www.cloud66.com/ http://www.cloud66.com/
    - doublerebel 11y ago
beachstartup 11y ago
this is going to happen no matter what - the rate of consolidation in my opinion is actually accelerating. despite what anyone says, the vast majority of people choose their hosting provider in order to "not get fired", i.e. they are extremely risk-averse, to the point of irrationality, even when presented with massive savings, better service, better underlying hardware and network, and more transparency. most of the time they are spending someone else's money, also. you should see some of the deals that have come across my desk. the 'big names' can literally charge 2-5x more than a competitive quote and get away with it, oftentimes with worse deliverables (i.e. long stretches of downtime that somehow get a pass from their customers). at the end of the day it's a server sitting in a rack in a datacenter, connected to ethernet. beyond a certain level of quality (tier 3 dc, server class hardware, an enterprise quality network) it's really all the same. people should choose their hosting provider on 1. quality of implementation 2. price and 3. whether or not the provider actually gives a shit about you and your account, but they usually just go with the name, like many other markets.
- yeukhon 11y ago
  > most of the time they are spending someone else's money, also. you should see some of the deals that have come across my desk. the 'big names' can literally charge 2-5x more than a competitive quote and get away with it, oftentimes with worse deliverables (i.e. long stretches of downtime that somehow get a pass from their customers). Even AWS can charge you big time. As I am getting more and more familiar with AWS every day, the #1 thing on my list going forward is to to sit down with your TAM and organize architecture review. There are services on AWS lacking completeness and can bite you in the end if you go straight with it without knowing what you are getting into. Disclaimer: I like AWS pretty well.

jedicoffee 11y ago