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Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

170 points by bachback 10y ago

AWS has captured an enormous market. As a user I'm surprised there are only few serious contenders (cloud provider with an API and global footprint). Digitalocean has managed to captured the low end of the spectrum for people looking to run a few servers. Any serious alternatives to AWS today? Google App engine is still closely tied to there way of doing things.

hurricaneSlider 10y ago
We use Azure. In some aspects they're playing catch up but if you're a startup and can get into their bizspark program, there are a lot of benefits. They are also making a significant effort to open their platform to Linux, Docker and other cloud technologies beyond Windows.
- blahi 10y ago
  >In some aspects they're playing catch up And it some aspects, they are way ahead. Analytics is one of those examples.
  - UK-AL 10y ago
    I like their monitoring tools.
jburwell 10y ago
The following are a few alternatives off the top of my head: * Google Compute Engine * Microsoft Azure * Joyent * IBM BlueMix * Linode (like DigitalOcean more VPS than cloud provider)
- znpy 10y ago
  I think that Joyent does not get the coverage it deserves. SmartOS looks very very cool.
  - ceejayoz 10y ago
    Joyent's made some bad PR moves. I was a Textdrive customer and the way they treated the lifetime hosting folks put a very sour taste in my mouth.
    - opendomain 10y ago
      I was a textdrive "lifetime" customer. I paid thousands and received nothing. Do not use Joyent.
      - amock 10y ago
        I was also a "lifetime" customer and my memories of the terrible treatment, including one of the founders flaming people on the forums for making reasonable requests, mean I will never do business with Joyent again.
  - doublerebel 10y ago
    Joyent is fantastic. SmartOS has every feature a Linux user wants in (and usually ends up hacking onto) a cloud server but it's built that way from the ground up. Their support and engineering staff are friendly and responsive by email and IRC. The instances have great performance and uptime. I suppose globally they could use more data centers but Samsung's acquisition should help with that. I've built multiple companies in Joyent and can't imagine going back to other clouds with less features.
  - jurajlutter 10y ago
    We (Erigones, https://www.erigones.com/en/ https://www.erigones.com/en/) are making our own virtualization, orchestration and cloud suite, available for public use, based on SmartOS. So far for commercial customers only (demo available) but we will release opensource community edition soon on Github.
- bachback 10y ago
  Google is not as general as AWS and therefore has serious vendor lockin. Azure only recently has decided to support docker and is not rooted in opensource. The big downside of AWS: to difficult to use for many. It seems to me a new entrant which combines easy of use, embraces opensource, would have a good chance in the market. + Rackspace. But like many these don't come from the cloud market and still think in terms of servers mostly.
  - pacala 10y ago
    > Google is not as general as AWS and therefore has serious vendor lockin. Presumably you are talking about Google App Engine, which is just a small part of GCP. Amazon's comparable offering is Elastic Beanstalk. The core building blocks on GCP and AWS are the same: raw virtual machines you can build anything upon yourself, GCE vs EC2. GCE has been around since 2012.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - jimjimjim 10y ago
    ?? starting a AskHN then quickly responding to an answer by incorrectly discrediting it? Are you really asking a question? Google has a lot of different things as part of it's offerings. but very quickly: Google App Engine = google handles as lot for you. not a vm Google Compute Engine = vm's plus an easy to use interface
  - nl 10y ago
    You are thinking of Google App Engine. You want Google Computer Engine: https://cloud.google.com/compute/ https://cloud.google.com/compute/ "Google Compute Engine delivers virtual machines running in Google's innovative data centers and worldwide fiber network." Azure is the other major option.
- gaius 10y ago
  * Aliyun * Lucera * Oracle
- Sami_Lehtinen 10y ago
  UpCloud is worth of checking out: https://www.upcloud.com/ https://www.upcloud.com/ - It's a pure VPS vendor with full management API.
tf2manu994 10y ago
Maybe not what you wanted but hetzner? Crazy cheap. Support is garbage.
- bachback 10y ago
  thanks, but I don't think hetzner is cloud based. most hosters still speak about servers as physical machines as in 2005.
k0nsl 10y ago
You can just buy some cheap "dedicated slices" at BuyVM (buyvm.net). They're a great company.
tshtf 10y ago
Google has far more than App Engine today; they basically compete with AWS directly service by service.
- mrep 10y ago
  I would love a direct service to service comparison between the major cloud providers. Anyone know of a guide like that?
  - vgt 10y ago
    Aw well here ya go then! https://cloud.google.com/docs/compare/aws/ https://cloud.google.com/docs/compare/aws/
    - mrep 10y ago
      Wow, thank you. Albeit, that only shows google's matchings to AWS, but AWS has like 60 services. I would also like to be able to breakdown the services to see comparisons in things like SLA's and pricing but this is a good start.
      - vgt 10y ago
        Ah this old thing? :) https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/ https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/ Yes, tough to cover it all. I believe Azure has a similar "Azure to AWS" comparison. The GCP one is built by folks expertly familiar with AWS and tried to be as factual as possible. I've previously collected a bunch of Google Cloud customer stories here (not Google PR - customers): https://www.medium.com/google-cloud/i-think-google-cloud-is-the-best-best-tech-best-pricing-best-support-best-roadmap-and-best-4b4e17856505 https://www.medium.com/google-cloud/i-think-google-cloud-is-... Happy to answer any questions! (obv. biased and work on Google Cloud)
  - gbrayut 10y ago
    You can run benchmarks using https://cloudharmony.com https://cloudharmony.com but it looks like there site is having issues right now.
sidcool 10y ago
I have used Google Compute Engine, and we're quite happy. The I/O especially is quite good.
brudgers 10y ago
To me, the alternatives to AWS depend on the workload. For Netflix the alternative is building a chain of massive data centers or negotiating with Microsoft or negotiating with Google. For a Ruby on Rails app, Heroku is one. For someone just monkeying around with Kubernetes, maybe a some Raspberry Pi. The alternatives also are related to the specific business. For Home Depot, running on AWS means running in a competitor's data center. The problem of finding and alternative to AWS really boils down to research, and that's a time commitment versus just whipping out the plastic. One might say, "Nobody ever got fired for using AWS."
- bdcravens 10y ago
  Heroku is on AWS. If that's an alternative, then there are others that similarly run atop AWS, such as Cloud66.
  - brudgers 10y ago
    A good point. I suppose that what 'an alternative to AWS' is varies too. By which I mean that Heroku is an alternative to AWS from the standpoint of user interface and API's in the same way that Haskell is an alternative to C even though both can ultimately place values in x64 CPU registers and cause JMP's to locations in memory.
nik736 10y ago
Depends on what exactly a cloud provider is for you. If it's only about VMs with an API and global footprint there are several options: - GCE - SoftLayer (IBM IaaS) - Azure And additionally there are several other providers that are more comparable to DigitalOcean like Vultr, Linode, Scaleway, etc.
- bachback 10y ago
  true. I'm looking for something where I can potentially build the whole IaaS myself on baremetal at some point. Vultr looks great - thanks!
  - dastbe 10y ago
    For fun, or for profit? Building IaaS to support your own company is hard enough; building it with the level of isolation and security required to be multitenant is harder still.
- doozy 10y ago
  iwStack fits the bill too
twelvenmonkeys 10y ago
If you'd like to try something simple, use us: https://datamantle.com https://datamantle.com just a simple VPS provider.
user5994461 10y ago
Google has all the exact same offerings as AWS. The IaaS part is called GCE (Google Compute Engine): https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing Given all your comments in this thread. You seem to struggle quite a lot to understand the market and you didn't clarify what you want to achieve (how many servers do you have now? how many applications do you run? how many dev? how big is your company?) So forgive me for thinking you are either a hobbyist or a newcomer, with rather simple needs. If that's the case, GCE and AWS are overkill. You should stick to Digital Ocean or Linode. It's wayyy simpler and cheaper.
- bbcbasic 10y ago
  Is using Digital Ocean and administering your own box simpler than using the off the shelf DB/storage options provide db AWS? Surely the AWS options save you doing all the DBA / Server admin / security work. Albeit for more money but time = money.
  - lukeschlather 10y ago
    I don't think AWS is really simpler unless you have lots of hosts to manage. Maybe if you have 3 hosts AWS might be simpler, for some workloads. Most workloads, probably more like 10, and only if you're scaling out, not maintaining 10 totally different fiddly low-traffic apps.
  - chimeracoder 10y ago
    > Surely the AWS options save you doing all the DBA / Server admin / security work. Albeit for more money but time = money. They do, but you need to invest enough to understand AWS's offerings, and how they fit together. Amazon's documentation is very extensive, I'll give it that - but it takes a while to build enough of a mental model to know how to fit everything together. Generally, managing your own server is closer to the skillset people already have when starting out (unless your training was platform-specific), so starting off with a raw VPS may in fact be quicker, even if in the long term AWS/Google/etc. would save time for someone who's equally experienced in both.
  - 10y ago
nwrk 10y ago
Oracle
NetStrikeForce 10y ago
I'm not sure you're looking for an AWS alternative if you think DigitalOcean is one. Right now only Azure (behind) and Google Cloud (way behind) are alternatives to AWS. If what you need is just VMs and a CRUD API, then yes, DO is a very good alternative (I run most of my servers with them).
- notwedtm 10y ago
  What about GCE makes you feel they are further behind AWS than Azure? Azure has more regions, but my experience is that GCE is quickly catching up in features and services in comparison to AWS.
  - NetStrikeForce 10y ago
    That's the impression I get from following these series of comparisons (unfinished! I guess there's a chance my opinion might change at the end of it): https://blogs.endjin.com/2016/07/aws-vs-azure-vs-google-cloud-platform/ https://blogs.endjin.com/2016/07/aws-vs-azure-vs-google-clou... I also e.g. have the impression that the most comprehensive/complete/ready to use container solution seems to be GKE, so on some specific areas there would be different "winners". In overall terms I got the feeling Google has a simpler offering than AWS and Azure.
obulpathi 10y ago
Google Cloud is not an alternative, but a much better option. If you have pains with AWS or want a better version of Cloud (ease of use, performance, scalability), give Google Cloud a try.
cjbprime 10y ago
Azure, Google Cloud, Rackspace.
Jaepa 10y ago
There are a couple options, but it kind of depends on what you want. There is Openstack, which is a collections of IaaS provider with connected with an API. Digitial Ocean & Vultr which you already know about. GCE mentioned else where here. Linode, while not feature rich is the 2nd largest VPS provider. Azure, which is Microsoft's IaaS. Which I've always had some reservations about, but have actually subcontracted management out separate companies to protect user info. Scalaway is great low price option but there AZ's are mostly in Europe. I'm personally using LunaNode, which doesn't offer nearly as many nine's in up time, but is great for the price (I have a 3 cpu, with 2G of ram, for ~$10 a month). There are tonnes of IaaS platforms out there, very few have the full feature set of EC2, but again it depends on what you want.
- bArray 10y ago
  Just signed up to Scalaway. Being in France is pretty neat as it's close to the UK so I understand their law. Currently running an AWS nano instance but I think I'm paying too much for it. Unfortunately it seems as though they are out of the C1 instances. Thanks for the heads up!
  - quuuux 10y ago
    On the lower end of their server types I can recommend their VC1 instances as an alterantive. In my experience they offer noticeably better performance with regards to both CPU and IO than the dedicated C1 boxes.
kayman 10y ago
Digital Ocean is the most popular. But as others have mentioned, there is also Vultr. Vultr has locations in Sydney which was a big plus for me. I personally can vouch for Vultr. Been running a freebsd system with them for over a year now. When clients ask about AWS, I throw in Digital Ocean or Vultr so they can save a ton of money. Most of the the time, they go with AWS as it is the most popular but tends to be an overkill for most of the projects I'm dealing with.
Feld0 10y ago
OVH specializes in dedicated servers (https://www.ovh.com/ca/en/dedicated-servers/ https://www.ovh.com/ca/en/dedicated-servers/) but they offer an API for ordering them and can deliver many of them within a couple of minutes. They have a number of "cloud"/managed offerings as well if you browse around their site. They have datacentres in France and Canada, and are currently bringing up new ones in the US, Australia, and Singapore that they hope to launch by the end of the year. I've been a customer for >3 years now and have been very pleased with their service and support. OP mentioned a desire to work with bare metal/do IaaS their own way, and dedicated server providers are awesome for that. Conversations about infrastructure are often about "cloud vs. running our own datacentres!" and renting dedicated servers is an interesting middle ground - you get a ton of hardware and bandwidth for your dollar and maintaining the hardware isn't your problem. You give up per-hour billing but you could very well still save money - it's a serious alternative to VPS providers like DigitalOcean.
- candiodari 10y ago
  They also have their cheaper branch www.kimsufi.com, lower specs, still dedicated. And you still wouldn't believe the speed difference of a low atom with a VPS, even if the VPS is running on a xeon. Goes double for tail latency.
  - jonatron 10y ago
    Also the uptime on my kimsufi is 530 days, you're unlikely to get that with a VPS, or 'cloud instance'.
    - petercooper 10y ago
      I wondered about that as I have tons of VPSes - the highest was in the 300s. My Hetzner server, though, 1389 days and counting!
- kyriakos 10y ago
  Had good experiences with OVH, their offerings are stable and their support is good. You can talk to an actual human even if you just have a single server.
codingdave 10y ago
What are you trying to achieve? There are a plethora of choices and services out there, but without knowing what you want to do, all we can do is give you a list of company names.
Rauchg 10y ago
If you want to focus on the code and not the servers, give a try to https://zeit.co/now https://zeit.co/now Disclosure: co-founder and CEO
- wreft 10y ago
  Looks interesting. Can you explain why someone would use this over the alternatives?
- mars4rp 10y ago
  MDG is expanding to the whole node.js ecosystem. You should become established before Galaxy enters your market !!!
em3rgent0rdr 10y ago
open source alternatives to AWS (you can self-host): https://www.rackspace.com/openstack https://www.rackspace.com/openstack http://cloudstack.apache.org http://cloudstack.apache.org http://www8.hp.com/us/en/cloud/helion-eucalyptus-overview.html http://www8.hp.com/us/en/cloud/helion-eucalyptus-overview.ht... http://opennebula.org http://opennebula.org
mlacks 10y ago
I've learned to really appreciate what Joyent brings to the table, as far as philosophy, but I haven't had the chance to really test it out for myself.
caghan 10y ago
If you're looking for something new, you should try Live Vertical Resize at skyAtlas. http://www.skyatlas.com/why-skyatlas/ http://www.skyatlas.com/why-skyatlas/
lwhalen 10y ago
Profitbricks, Rackspace, hosting it yourself on an Openstack cluster, etc. There are really a glut of 'cloud providers' out there, you just have to do the footwork of defining your needs and then finding one that meets most of them. Alternatively you could hire a consultant (hi!) to assist you, if you'd prefer to stay focused on the business side of things.
smtt 10y ago
Depends on your exact needs and such but I really like Heroku, it doesn't have as much as AWS or GCE but it has some nice benefits like good monitoring/stats, very cool pipelines system and super easy scaling
meddlepal 10y ago
Google Cloud Platform and Azure. I have a lot of experience with GCP (mostly Compute Engine) and really really like it.
api 10y ago
Personally I am partial to heterogeneous deployments across commodity vendors like Digital Ocean, Vultr, Linode, OVH, etc. You do have to think a little bit more about security and devops but you get a lot of power and robustness for a lot less money. We do use S3 for backups and big storage. That has no equal.
- danieltillett 10y ago
  This is exactly what I do and I have had 100% uptime for the last two years.
  - api 10y ago
    But that's not Enterprise(tm)! Seriously... I feel like the Big Cloud vendors are making a ton of money convincing a lot of people that you're not doing it right if you're not using their stuff.
- devonkim 10y ago
  Every time I do the math the bandwidth egress costs of AWS and GCE become rather large and non-trivial. How do you make it work for your workloads?
  - api 10y ago
    We don't use AWS or GCE. The other providers don't charge anywhere close to as much for bandwidth... to the point that deploying across multiple providers and using the Internet as our backplane network is no issue. One trick I like is to split infrastructure across 2-3 different providers at at least three different nearby data centers. Example: Chicago (Vultr), Toronto (DO), Montreal (OVH). Latency is low enough for most replication purposes and if one experiences a massive failure the other two will be fine. 3/3 failure probably requires alien invasion or global thermonuclear war.
- boulos 10y ago
  Google Cloud Storage (GCS) is in my (biased) opinion better than S3 in most ways. GCS's default buckets just work within all the US. For no extra $$, you get something you can read and write to at massive throughput in us-west1 (Oregon), us-central1 (Iowa) and us-east1 (South Carolina). This has totally changed how people use our compute offering compared to say EC2 plus S3. Similarly, we introduced Nearline which S3 sort of copied with Infrequent Access. Except S3-IA rounds all files up to 128 KB. Nearline is simple $.01/GB/month plus $.01/GB retrieved. All of this with the team maintaining their own JSON API and compatibility with the S3 API (which I use from my NAS box at home). tl;dr: GCS easily goes head to head with S3 (and often comes out on top). Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (and use GCS myself).
dogma1138 10y ago
When you say "AWS" what do you mean? there are tons of services under the AWS umbrella; to which specific ones are you looking for alternatives? If it's just "VPS" then there are plenty of providers, some even offer a compatibility with the AWS API (IIRC even Rackspace does that these days). If you are looking for an AWS specific service/platform e.g. Elasticsearch then you need to be specific. Overall AWS has a pretty extensive platform which is hard to beat, it's "META API" which governs security, users, deployments etc. is also one of it's key advantages.
ngrilly 10y ago
In my opinion, Google Compute Engine is a great alternative to AWS, better in most aspects. For something simpler, if you're looking for an alternative to Digital Ocean and are in Europe, excoscale.ch is interesting.
thom 10y ago
One easy alternative to AWS is just shovelling your cash directly onto a bonfire. However, if you care about the actual server bit, Rackspace have their 'hybrid' cloud offers. There's a small but well-thought-of company in the UK called Bytemark who have a cloud offering but I doubt it qualifies as having a global footprint.
- meritt 10y ago
  AWS is just meeting the needs of the startup community, like the monthly box subscription website who believes they have the same engineering problems as Netflix.
  - ranman 10y ago
    Netflix... which also runs on AWS. Or was that the joke? https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/
- hkt 10y ago
  I worked for Bytemark. If you want to automate from the start (even slightly) they're a pitifully bad choice, I am sad to say.
- AlexB138 10y ago
  Rackspace is, unfortunately, woefully behind the times when it comes to functionality. You're also looking at long term, very expensive, contracts for individual physical boxes if you're doing a hybrid approach. Their once-fanatical-support has also taken a major quality hit due to all the waves the company has had to ride out. Even as a one-time fan, I would be hard pressed to start a new project on RS.
  - spartacle 10y ago
    I work at Rackspace, and our Public Cloud is run on Openstack, so it's hardly 'woefully behind the times when it comes to functionality'. We have one of the old, and largest deployments of OS there is, so there are some technical challenges and loads of new features coming.
ajb 10y ago
Anyone tried Alibaba's cloud: https://intl.aliyun.com/ https://intl.aliyun.com/ ?
setheron 10y ago
We just announced our bare metal cloud service at Oracle. It's still new but pretty cool team and underlying tech.
- Jonnax 10y ago
  I did a quick search of the site and couldn't find any information on pricing. Is it one of those things where if you have to ask, it's too expensive for you?
vayarajesh 10y ago
Google cloud - I have recently been working on setting up our company's entire infrastructure on google cloud and we were up and running in no time (very happy currently). - Great pricing - Great API (command line, REST) - Nearly perfect documentation - Awesome support (I had requested to allow more static ip addresses to be reserved and they resolved my ticket in less than 4 hours) - Very intuitive interface They give you $300 free credits before setting up billing account for you to try the entire cloud for free. You can play around with google cloud with up to 8 VMs They also have App engine and Container engine to manage your applications / containers at scale. Other simple cloud features include - storage buckets, snapshots, VPNs etc.
- michaelt 10y ago
  Nearly perfect documentation I've Google Cloud's documentation pretty awful, at least when it comes to authentication - which you need to do to get started with almost anything. AWS starts out simple (Paste your access key and secret key here) and you can adopt very complicated practices as your needs evolve; Google Cloud's design and documentation, on the other hand, seems to jump to very complicated from the start (scopes, service accounts, user accounts, projects, application default credentials, PKCS12, access tokens, refresh tokens...) I haven't found the documentation very helpful at all - or perhaps the system is just too complicated for the documentation to ever be much good.
  - vayarajesh 10y ago
    They have a in-app interactive tutorials which guides each step necessary to get you started which was pretty cool. We currently use more of compute engine and the documentation for it was really clear for us. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/ https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/ May be needs more clarification in general I guess
- _1 10y ago
  > - Nearly perfect documentation > - Awesome support Two things never said about google products
pyritschard 10y ago
Exoscale sits in the middle between AWS and Digital Ocean. It has a much narrower catalog than that of AWS but essential services needed to drive cloud application.
crypt1d 10y ago
I work as a SysAdmin / DevOps and I tried many of the ones which were mentioned so far. Here is my summary. I'll skip AWS as everyone is familiar with it at this point. Digitalocean - very friendly UI with lots of options to spin quickly virtual machines, in many different regions. Some options for backups, etc, but not much on top. They have an API that could allow you to setup orchestration though, which is pretty cool. For a small to medium shop, it should be fine. OVH - similar story as DO, except they have a bigger network and also offer a wide range of dedicated servers. They seem to be more EU centric but also have a Canadian DC. Their 'child' services kimsurfi and soyoustart offer very affordable dedicated server options, targeted at people doing minor projects and gaming rigs. They also run runabove.com, which is their 'lab' project - here they used to offer power8 VMs, etc. Hetzner - cheap dedicated servers in Europe. Recently added DDOS protection. They have a 'marketplace' where u can bid on dedicated servers and thus avoid initial setup costs. Leaseweb - also pretty good, they have a range of products similar to OVH (dedicated servers, VPS, cloud, etc). Haven't used GCE yet unfortunately, but I heard good things about it. Seems to be the only real direct contender to AWS at this point.
- tluyben2 10y ago
  For just (at least these days) reliable metal I would second OVH. I have been running servers there for 15 years, starting with support in French only. They used to have issues but now they are, for me, best bang for my buck: storage, cpu etc for spidering setups, experimenting, non critical heavy experiments etc. I have many servers which went from that kind of status to full prod because of convenience and they have not let me down through several major version debian updates.
  - daddykotex 10y ago
    +1 for OVH as well. Super stable VM for a very good prixe.
  - herbst 10y ago
    price is amazing but the support can suck hard. I had one of my servers down for over 12 hours (even thought i noticed it instantly) because they claimed the issue is on my site. After 12 hours, many telephonates and so more they wrote a simple semi automated email that they found a broken cable and fixed it... Still pissed to this day, but yeah the price for the power is amazing.
ssalat 10y ago
Good question! AWS is currently getting a mess for us. We're facing an auto scaling spot instance bug (it's definitely one) and we're trying since 3 days to contact anybody from them to get our business back on to the road! We're now forced to sign-up for a paid support plan. Nevertheless, they already breached the SLA of 12 hours, it's really frustrating... First thought after 5 years of paying them a lot of money to migrate somewhere else (e.g. Google). It's always ciritcal if you lose your customer contact by implementing strange support barriers to earn 3$ more. A not anymore happy AWS customer
- planetix 10y ago
  So you never paid for their support or had interaction with a account manager? Sounds like you had blind trust on your "partner" instead of building connection and paying at least for business support.
  - ssalat 10y ago
    Sure – like I've written above: we're paying now and don't receive any response either!
- boundlessdreamz 10y ago
  While I like GCE more than AWS, when it comes to support GCE is also paid-only. GCE plans are much easier to understand though. TIL AWS support plan cost varies by how much you bill and higher the bill, higher the support cost!. That doesn't make any sense.
  - ssalat 10y ago
    Yes, this is absolutely not transparent!
- 0xmohit 10y ago
  > we're trying since 3 days to contact anybody from them to get our business back on to the road! Didn't they already tell you how to "architect applications for resilience"? I was told that on more than one occasion. Essentially that one should be prepared if features don't work as advertised or unexpected things (including hardware issues) happen. > First thought after 5 years of paying them a lot of money to migrate somewhere else (e.g. Google). The thing that works in their favor is that some of the features tend to be a specific to the provider in question. The more one uses those features, chances are that they'd find it increasingly difficult to migrate elsewhere.
apapli 10y ago
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. </end sarcasm> Seriously, worth a look if you need a solid alternative to AWS.
- bikamonki 10y ago
  You meant </sarcasm>
  - apapli 10y ago
    Too true :)
St-Clock 10y ago
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/ https://www.stormondemand.com/
elcct 10y ago
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.
- ekiara 10y ago
  Do they have any sort of pricing page? It seems to be buried down in their site somewhere, I can't find anything.
  - elcct 10y ago
    As far as I know Rancher is free and open source
- robeastham 10y ago
  Another vote for Rancher here, though I have to confess I've only just started to use it seriously. Very slick and flexible. Look into running Deis on top of it.
TheAceOfHearts 10y ago
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 https://github.com/AppScale/appscale
- kkrs 10y ago
  It shouldn't be too hard to build an interface that abstracts away datastore specific details.
jsingleton 10y ago
Azure looks like the only major one you missed. I've used both AWS and Azure a lot. The best one will obviously depend on your use case but if you avoid lock in it shouldn't matter too much. I may write more on this if people are interested. AWS comparison: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/campaigns/azure-vs-aws/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/campaigns/azure-vs-aws/ They have more regions than AWS (30 vs 13): https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/regions/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/regions/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/ The naming is a bit funny though: https://unop.uk/azure-eu-regions-naming-confusion/ https://unop.uk/azure-eu-regions-naming-confusion/ Someone here thought this was due to using UN regions.
- pdelgallego 10y ago
  I would love to read more about AWS vs Azure, how services compare, and strategies on how to avoid lock in. Any recommendation?
  - mmcconnell1618 10y ago
    Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft so I won't get into comparisons with AWS. I wanted to point out a couple of facts that might be interesting to Hacker News readers: * 35% of virtual machines in Azure run Linux * Microsoft announced that PowerShell, Service Fabric and SQL Server will be available for Linux * Redis Cache, Hadoop and other open source packages are available as Platform as a Service offerings in addition to you installing and managing on your own machines.
  - jnsaff2 10y ago
    I have previously built a auto-scaling/healing Mesos cluster on AWS for a retail company (scaling heavily during peak and sometimes during promotions) and doing the same on Azure for a much bigger retail organisation at the moment. So this is my in the trenches comparison: - AWS documentation is excellent, Azure docs are weird and inconsistent and for some bits nonexistent. - Azure API's are inconsistent and weird, but once you figure out they work relatively well. But the lack of documentation compounds confusion. - Azure has a lot of very weird limitations that don't make any sense: -- Default Centos images are 30GB osDisk and you can't resize them, you have to create your own images if you do want to. -- You can have SSD's in 128/512/1024GB sizes and you pay for them in full, Spinning disks are billed per actual usage. -- You have to store your osDisk image in the same storage account as your machine you are running (so you have to pay for your image the full SSD monthly price) -- You have a VMSS (=Auto Scaling Group) and have a Load Balancer in front of it, your microservice connections fail if the load balancer routes the connection back to the same VM ... you now have to have another VMSS just for load balancing/service discovery. - Their services labelled Beta are really more like Alpha quality. - On the plus side, their ARM templates are richer and nicer to use than CloudFormation, however the lack of documentation for them kills all the advantages. - When you jump all the hoops and get past the issues, the things work relatively well.
orsenthil 10y ago
DC/OS from Mesosphere is a an alternative to AWS that you should consider looking into. (Ref: https://mesosphere.com/product/ https://mesosphere.com/product/) That will reduce your reliance on Amazon to just hardware, that's what are you paying for. In addition, you can use Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, your datacenter alongside as a single homogenous cluster.
jpkeisala 10y ago
I have been using Hetzner, I have few servers there. Linux and Windows. They are very cheap if you look someone in Europe. I usually recommend Hetzner and if there will be scaling problems we can always move to expensive places like AWS and Azure. I also have great experiences with Azure but not sure how it fits to startup world. I am only working on Azure on enterprise (.NET) customers and for them it is a nice service. Microsoft has Bizpark where you can get tons of Azure power for next to nothing. https://bizspark.microsoft.com//plus/ https://bizspark.microsoft.com//plus/ I have not worked on Google Cloud but as mentioned in comments I probably should look into that.
jpkeisala 10y ago
I have been using Hetzner, I have few servers there. Linux and Windows. They are very cheap if you look someone in Europe. I usually recommend Hetzner and if there will be scaling problems we can always move to expensive places like AWS and Azure. I also have great experiences with Azure but not sure how it fits to startup world. I am only working on Azure on enterprise (.NET) customers and for them it is a nice service. Microsoft has Bizpark where you can get tons of Azure power for next to nothing. https://bizspark.microsoft.com//plus/ https://bizspark.microsoft.com//plus/ I have not worked on Google Cloud but as mentioned in comments I probably should look into that.
omginternets 10y ago
On a related note, is there a SaaS platform for access to cheap (~ $.001 +/- $.002 per Gb) disk space?
- ekiara 10y ago
  You could tie your cheap or free Openshift/Heroku to multiple free BackBlaze B2 storage accounts. Depending on how 'grey' you're willing to behave you can get away with doing a lot on a virtually free infrastructure.
  - omginternets 10y ago
    Could you please elaborate? What is involved in doing this?
olavgg 10y ago
There is a lot of votes here for cloud providers. And while I think AWS is great, it is not great at everything. What I've done recently is buying used servers and 10G/40g network switches from Ebay and rented a colo(colocation) rack, which can be had from $500-$1000 per month per rack. This often includes 100mbit++ internet, power, cooling and more (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colocation_centre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colocation_centre) This has been the most cost effective way for me to deploy for example Hadoop, Ceph, Elasticsearch, Huge Varnish cache solutions. While I understand this is not for everyone, it is absolutely something to consider if you have a strong devops team. I do all this myself as I've build my own automation tools over the years that simplify setup and monitoring. On the other hand, I use AWS for GPU instances as I find it very cost effective because it is very easy to scale up and down by demand. And investing in this kind of hardware is expensive/risky. The power efficiency / performance is still following Moores law for each year for GPU's, and I expect new hardware that is better optimized for neural networks / machine learning is just around the corner.
- osipov 10y ago
  I did a cost analysis of Amazon GPUs vs. Softlayer GPUs and the latter gave me a better price/performance ratio.
  - imroot 10y ago
    But what you'll get in performance, you'll lose in sanity. I know that everyone has their "Horror" stories about a provider that they'd avoid at all costs, but, Softlayer still has an IBM "Mindset." Provisioning servers? You ask them, then their sales team approves -- hardly automatic. Seemingly minor changes to their system will force a hypervisor restart, and dealing with their account reps for anything is a nightmare. I'm not saying that Amazon is the end-all, be-all; I'm just saying that the grass isn't greener on the softlayer side of the fence.
    - sokoloff 10y ago
      Softlayer made my "do not do business with again" list after about 3 years of renting a server from them. I cancelled the server within what I believed (and still believe) to be the time required and they billed me an extra month, refusing to acknowledge the cancellation was timely submitted. They sit right behind Oracle and Verisign on the "never again" list.
koolhead17 10y ago
https://minio.io https://minio.io - Open source alternative to AWS-S3, written in go.
- buraksarica 10y ago
  The word "Alternative" may create little bit over-expectation on this product.
samblr 10y ago
Google app engine with flexible environment is really cool. Google-app-engine couple of years ago was claustrophobic with most of the things baked inside its environment. As a developer I felt restricted and there was the fear of locking in. But with intro of flexible environment its really good for any web application (except ones with real-time communication as sockets arent supported yet). So for now way to work around this is - have a (GKE) kubernetes handle all real time traffic and REST traffic to app-engine. I havent used AWS so so cant comment on it - but there is another reason its better to be on google compute engine - Google kind of leads in machine learning and AI - so when they decide to role out goodies on server side - its not a bad idea staying close to these. edit: really food -> really good :)
- rbanffy 10y ago
  AppScale makes a Google App Engine environment you can deploy on your own infrastructure.
youdontknowtho 10y ago
Seriously...haven't looked at Azure?
nivertech 10y ago
I gathered a lot of bookmarks for major IaaS clouds comparison on twitter: https://twitter.com/nivertech/status/679058892052168705 https://twitter.com/nivertech/status/679058892052168705 https://twitter.com/nivertech/status/782892922580664320 https://twitter.com/nivertech/status/782892922580664320
stephengillie 10y ago
My employer operates 18 data centers in 7 countries around the world. We offer a competitive array of services and features, dynamic networking configuration, numerous ecosystem partners, API access to all of this, and high-quality support. https://www.ctl.io/ https://www.ctl.io/
- NetStrikeForce 10y ago
  I'm not sure why you've been downvoted, so I gave you my upvote because your comment is relevant. I've clicked on the link and your employer is CenturyLink, which is not a bunch of friends with a rack in a garage.
my123 10y ago
Azure with Ressource Manager instead of Classic.
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Joyent, Google, and MS are the alternatives that usually come up. I haven't used any of them myself, and I've heard good and bad things about all of them. That probably wasn't very helpful.
jmknyc06 10y ago
You should check out Hyper.sh! Very simple Docker hosting cloud with per second pricing and great documentation and support.
herbst 10y ago
pretty much any trendy smaller cloud provider comes with a API today. Think digital ocean or my favorite exoscale. Most of them are by far cheaper than the big 3.
rpcope1 10y ago
If you're looking for low end, lowendbox.com is a great resource. In particular I've had pretty good luck with both HostUS(https://hostus.us/ https://hostus.us/) and Joe's Datacenter in Kansas City (http://joesdatacenter.com/ http://joesdatacenter.com/). OVH and Hetzner are also big players in this sphere, if you're looking for a VPS/dedi in particular.
- hacym 10y ago
  HostUS has been great for me. But Joe's stores account passwords in plain text. Don't use em.
smilliken 10y ago
Check out NephoScale. I'm a happy customer for years. They have cloud and dedicated machines, so you're not forced to choose. Their machines have high performance hardware, which saves you enormous amounts of time not having to deal with unreliable networks, weak virtualized CPUs, low IOPS disks...
bArray 10y ago
Somebody recently informed me of Profit Server: https://profitserver.ru/en/ https://profitserver.ru/en/ The benefits are that the service is extremely cheap.
recmend 10y ago
Google Cloud, Azure, IBM Softlayer, RackSpace, Digital Ocean, Linode.
dhirajbajaj 10y ago
It depends what your app stack requirement is. Google appengine is PAAS based, has competitive features and low priced than AWS EBS comparative. Google compute service is IAAS based and EC2 comparative. I found, transition from AWS to GAE is usually not that easy and quick at least for a simple rails app deployment using Postgres. Appengine has still less developers community which is why learning curve is high and you need to dig and troubleshoot more than AWS which is abundant with tutorials, gems, plugins etc.

slake 10y ago

My opinion on this is that you still learn and deploy on AWS or GCE. The learning curve might be steep at first but it'll save a lot of heartache when your organization scales or you want to set up a complex deployment that one of the smaller players don't necessarily support.

falsedan 10y ago
Classic premature optimisation. Those hours spent mastering the 10s of products you need to use to do it the 'right' way would be better spent on marketing, business logic, and 5 minutes installing apache + php on a Digital Ocean droplet which also is the dev environment. If your company suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune & needs to migrate, you can paid someone who is an expert to help you migrate, because that's their business, and yours is presumably something else.
- lox 10y ago
  That is a false dichotomy. The reality should fall in between, learn enough to understand some of the design choices you make, but don't overcook it.
  - corobo 10y ago
    Learn enough to go live. Hire people who know the rest. Learn enough to do the rest if you want to work for someone else doing the rest.
  - falsedan 10y ago
    I don't think it's a false dichotomy: I can only do one thing at a time, and my time is limited.
- boulos 10y ago
  You don't need to be a cloud expert to start with GCE or EC2 instead of a VPS provider. If you end up just going straight to GCE instead of a droplet that's not a big mental hurdle. Then as the parent said, if you suddenly need to scale up, bolt on other services (like say GCS or Cloud SQL) you're not starting with a migration. You will spend more than $5/month on either AWS or GCP, but the example here seems focused on a business not a throwaway. So IMO, it is more like premature optimization to have a $5/month droplet instead of a $30/month set of GCE instances. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
  - plandis 10y ago
    Okay this is like your 6 or 7th post in this discussion advertising for Google. Can we stop wth the spam now?
    - boulos 10y ago
      Sigh. I didn't want to respond, but someone pointed out to me that you work at Amazon (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12181599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12181599). I think it's fair to say that in a thread asking about alternatives to AWS, I was both factual and disclosed my non-trivial source of potential bias (so my statements didn't constitute spam). Again, I don't mean this to be an ad hominem response, but I take the disclosure "expectation" seriously, and it's frustrating to see folks (competitor or not) try to squelch discussion. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
user5994461 10y ago
> when your organization scales Case in point: AWS/GCE are intended for organizations. If you're not operating an organization, they're overkill. Do the Quick test: Is your budget less than $100/month? If yes, use Digital Ocean.
- boulos 10y ago
  I'm not sure I agree! Yours isn't a bad test, but honestly for many people I route them to App Engine depending on their need ("you just want a simple Python web app with no traffic and no hassle? Yeah, you should use GAE"). Having to deal with any infrastructure at all, even for a few hours per year is certainly going to make a VPS a worse choice for some folks. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

CaptSpify 10y ago
You meant to say "a customer that is pumping tons of money into Google succeed". Your average customer gets no such treatment. Sorry, Google has some great stuff, and is great at a lot of things, but customer support is not one of them.
- vgt 10y ago
  Perhaps the reputation you speak of transfers over from the B2C side, where Google makes services for billions and can't offer the human touch as easily. Have you had bad experiences with Google Cloud platform support specifically? I can only offer some customer voices: - Quizlet calls out support as a major reason for choosing GCP over AWS (among other things) [0] - "Paid Support is top notch" [1] - Spotify calls out the human side specifically [2] [0] https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-gcp https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-gcp [1] https://lugassy.net/why-we-moved-from-amazon-web-services-to-google-cloud-platform-726c412fd667#.7g9z9b1mt https://lugassy.net/why-we-moved-from-amazon-web-services-to... [2] https://news.spotify.com/au/2016/02/23/announcing-spotify-infrastructures-googley-future/ https://news.spotify.com/au/2016/02/23/announcing-spotify-in...
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    My experiences differ from that, as well as everyone I know. I know this is anecdotal, but I have never met anyone who has said good things about google support, including a google support rep. Maybe I'm just an outlier, but I also wouldn't use someone like the above example as a typical experience, as they are also an outlier.
    - vgt 10y ago
      Sorry to hear that. Again, are you specifically discussing Google Cloud support? It's a very different model.
  - erichocean 10y ago
    > Have you had bad experiences with Google Cloud platform support specifically? Yes, and cancelled our account as a result.
    - vgt 10y ago
      Sorry to hear that. Certainly not what we strive for. May I ask you to send me your specific experience to my email? (username at google dotcom). I would be happy to share it with our support teams and get a postmortem going? (I work at Google Cloud)
      - erichocean 10y ago
        Thanks for the offer. I'm swamped and we moved off of GCE last spring, so I don't have the info readily available. If we consider GCE in the future, I'll ping you before we do so we can ensure what happened to us then doesn't happen again. Thanks!

imaginenore 10y ago

"great pricing" it is not. None of the major cloud providers have great pricing with the exception of some niche cases. Look at Hetzner. Look at the cheap VPS options. Google/AWS don't come even close.

vayarajesh 10y ago
I think Hetzner is more of a hosting provider than a cloud services provider. If you are looking for a single server VPS for hosting then sure Hetzner is great in terms of pricing Google / AWS cloud is more for running applications at scale and dynamically creating VMs and load balancing across servers with storage, logging, snapshots etc as a service.
aibottle 10y ago
Yeah Hetzner is nice if you just need VMs and set up everything yourself. The big plus of GCP and AWS is the Platform. If you don't need hosted MySQL (because you want to set up that stuff yourself) or PubSub, Storage etc. go for Hetzner.
boulos 10y ago
Pricing of compute on GCE is extremely competitive. The per-minute billing (which Azure matched) really adds up for tons of workloads. Similarly, our custom shapes means you don't end up paying for twice as many cores (16 => 32) when you really want something in between. Where I do agree is networking egress. The big three providers all have metered bandwidth rates that are way above the "all inclusive" fee you pay to Hetzner, OVH, DO, and others. The cheapest way to host an ftp server that serves 20 TB per month is certainly on one of these (today). None of these providers will let you serve 1 PB / month this way, but if you're in their sweet spot and they can make it work out on average, it's a good fit. But if you're looking to just have a simple "VPS" in the cloud, our f1-micro is just over $4/month (the AWS t2 series is also super cheap). Again, you're right if you're talking about networking egress, but not everybody needs to serve multiple TB per month. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud, so I'm trying to take your money in exchange for services.
- jorangreef 10y ago
  "Pricing of compute on GCE is extremely competitive. The per-minute billing (which Azure matched) really adds up for tons of workloads." To the extent that a developer uses GCE for only part of a month? Or to the extent that a developer uses GCE for 100% of a month? I would think that GCE is not extremely competitive (relative to dedicated offerings) if used on a 24/7 basis.
veeti 10y ago
Hetzner is very much a budget host with mediocre support, etc. Most of their servers are built with desktop-grade hardware. You're comparing apples and oranges.

jsingleton 10y ago

Colo is certainly a cheap way to do things for a steady load, and you get great performance for the money, but who wants to get paged at 4am? I know HN and StackOverflow do things this way but I don't even want to manage the OS these days. We used to host our servers on-site and it was a massive pain. At least with colo you don't need to personally worry about power or internet going down, but you still need to replace dead disks.

CaptSpify 10y ago
Curious as to why you think aws means you won't get paged at 4-am? If you have a redundant setup, you won't get paged as everything can just fail-over.
- jsingleton 10y ago
  If you set things up badly then you can certainly get paged when on AWS. If you set things up correctly (multiple AZs / regions and auto scaling etc.) then it's much less likely. There could of course be software issues but hardware is no longer your problem and you can let experts do it for you. Yes, you could do this yourself but that would cost more and reduce the advantage. How many colo racks in how many data centres / countries do want to have to visit? Even with redundant hot spare fail-over you will need to fix the hardware at some point and will be running at risk until you do. A hybrid approach can work, with colo for the base load and cloud for scaling spikes / redundancy.
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    > hardware is no longer your problem and you can let experts do it for you. I've heard this before, but it's basically not true. You still have hardware problems, you're just paying to pretend they aren't there anymore. If you want to do that, it's OK, but we need to stop pretending that throwing money at a problem makes it go away. > Yes, you could do this yourself but that would cost more and reduce the advantage. Compared to AWS pricing? No thanks. I've yet to personally see a company save money by using AWS (ymmv of course). > Even with redundant hot spare fail-over you will need to fix the hardware at some point and will be running at risk until you do. Sure, but that's generally where you save your money. And if you do it right, it doesn't have to be at 4 am
    - iancarroll 10y ago
      At least with Google, you're paying for their transparent migration feature, which does make isolated hardware failures go away.
      - CaptSpify 10y ago
        Most of these places have systems in place to make hardware issues unimpactful, which is why they make the big bucks. But you still have hard limits and issues that can and do arise because it's still reliant on hardware.