5 ms·

I guess their bizarre thinking is something along the lines of: "unless we have proof that noone can access the service, we won't change the indicator from gree

• rattray 10y ago
  > I don't understand why you guys stay with AWS. Who do you recommend instead (assuming in-house or Hetzner-equiv is out of reach)? Google Cloud? Azure? Rackspace?
  • johansch 10y ago
    Google Cloud if you're looking for something similar. It's just so much better and cheaper. I think a lot of the resistance here towards that kind of move is just because people are inherently lazy and they aren't paying the bill themselves. (I'm guessing a relatively large part is also selfish attachment to the market leader because of employment reasons. I hate wasting money, both for myself and for my employer, so I don't really understand this kind of thinking - but I do understand how it could flourish in a venture capital-rich time/locale.) I also recommend reading: https://thehftguy.com/2016/06/15/gce-vs-aws-in-2016-why-you-should-never-use-amazon/ https://thehftguy.com/2016/06/15/gce-vs-aws-in-2016-why-you-...
    • joatmon-snoo 10y ago
      Google also doesn't have the best record for developer tools.
      • johansch 10y ago
        Let me guess. They cancelled your grandmother's RSS reader four years ago?
        • ecliptik 10y ago
          too soon
          • johansch 10y ago
            ;)
    • debaserab2 10y ago
      Google Cloud doesn't exactly have the greatest reliability/uptime either.
      • eicnix 10y ago
        https://status.cloud.google.com/summary https://status.cloud.google.com/summary tells a different story or do you have other information? I have used GCP for some time without being affected from any incident.
        • briffle 10y ago
          That is a pretty awesome page.. way better than a page full of green icons, during an obvious outage... I like that they have writeups a few days after the incidents....
        • debaserab2 10y ago
          I'm not sure what you mean. If anything that link underscores my point. GCE has absolutely had it's own catastrophic errors. Remember last April when ALL instances in ALL regions went down? https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/16007?post-mortem https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/16007?post-...
          • eicnix 10y ago
            The GCP services are usually within their SLA target so I don't see the problem with the incidents. So you know what you buy and can take actions if you need a higher SLA for your application.
            • debaserab2 10y ago
              > so I don't see the problem with the incidents All instances going down in all regions is an order of magnitude worse than a single service going down in a single region. You're deluding yourself if you think GCE is any more reliable than any other reputable cloud hosting platform.
          • 10y ago
    • chebum 10y ago
      GC's CDN doesn't cache files bigger than 4Mb. No Windows VMs. Bound to AWS for these 2 reasons.
      • dragonwriter 10y ago
        GCE supports Windows VMs. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/windows/ https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/windows/
      • vgt 10y ago
        Someone else already mentioned Windows VMs. Looks like CDN has a 10MB limit: https://cloud.google.com/cdn/docs/caching https://cloud.google.com/cdn/docs/caching (work at Google Cloud)
      • mrmaximus 10y ago
        As already mentioned, they do have Windows VM's but there are some caveats that indicate it's not fully baked yet. 1.) They require that each VM MUST have a public IP address so that Windows can talk to an activation server every 30 days. 2.) You cannot yet bring your own license.
  • pmalynin 10y ago
    OVH
    • LeoHaggins 10y ago
      Bad idea there, support is horrible.
      • rspeer 10y ago
        OVH doesn't even want to take my money to keep my server running. Their auto-billing process is busted and when it goes wrong they just delete your server.
        • fishnchips 10y ago
          That's not what I've seen. I misconfigured my auto-billing and got paged in the middle of the night by nodes mysteriously disappearing, but they released those machines minutes after my CC went through. Not that I'm a big fan of OVH but if you design your system to allow for failure you can't match their value for money.
      • jacquesm 10y ago
        What is your last datapoint on that? The last year or two has seen a remarkable improvement according to those customers of mine that host there.
  • kohuma 10y ago
    What about something like B2 from https://www.backblaze.com/ https://www.backblaze.com/ ?
    • Twirrim 10y ago
      S3 in a single region is based out of multiple data centres / availability zone, with data distributed so that the loss of a single availability zone won't impact either data availability or durability, even to the point of being comfortable with complete physical destruction of an AZ. The same applies for Azure, GCP etc. B2 is based out of a single DC (or at least, was at launch and I don't see anything that suggests that has changed?) You've got to decide what's most important to you. Data persistence or $$$.
• tlogan 10y ago
  > Seriously: I don't understand why you guys stay with AWS. I tried them all and Amazon is still the best.
• gtsteve 10y ago
  > Seriously: I don't understand why you guys stay with AWS. Personally I've been using it for ages and I know most services inside and out. They do suffer downtime in some regions occasionally, but it'd be too expensive at this point to move. And who doesn't suffer downtime? You can't avoid it; you just need a plan to deal with it. For example, having a backup replica bucket in another region and the ability to quickly switch your CDN over would probably be a good idea here; that's what I did. If you want to go further you can replicate your data to another cloud provider entirely and use low TTLs to switch to a backup CDN if your system is that mission-critical (in the event of a worldwide AWS failure doomsday scenario). All systems will fail you and it's our responsibility as IT professionals to have a plan to mitigate this.
  • johansch 10y ago
    Sunk cost fallacy. I do agree that we should all plan for failures. However, I also think it's a sign of failure in planning and architecture foresight if it's too expensive to move away from a particular cloud provider.
    • froogle 10y ago
      The sunk cost fallacy is when you (irrationally) decide to stick with what you're doing purely because you've already spent a lot of resources on it. It doesn't apply when you've done an economic analysis and found out it doesn't make sense to swap. There are plenty of cases where it just wouldn't make sense to switch after looking at the costs, opportunity costs, etc. For example, if his site makes him $10 a month, outages cost him $1 a month that could be mitigated by moving, and it would cost $1000 of labor to swap providers. (Depends on interest rates.) Perhaps it was originally a failure to not have a plan to easily move from a provider, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that right now it may cost too many hours of work to justify the move.
      • johansch 10y ago
        (You're right, I used that term incorrectly.) Still stand behind the other two points I made in that post though.
• cagataygurturk 10y ago
  Because you perceive public clouds only as virtual machine providers, that you can replace with other provider in two days. A detailed cloud migration consists of replacing some parts of your software to use managed services provided by a specific cloud provider, and AWS is still has the best service offerings IMHO. When you use these services carefully also you will see that AWS is very cheap and reliable enough. Outages like today's are happening in every platform and it is possible to mitigate them. You can use Adwords as a self-service user. Without knowing so much of details you can run your ads but also you can bery easily ruin your budget. But many enterprise customers use it very differently than those users and they are extremely optimizing the cost. Cloud is the same. If you don't know how big customers use AWS, it is normal that you are surprised because AWS is still leading the market. You say GCP is better than AWS. Which part is better? GCP does not have many services of AWS we benefit from. How can you compare totally different providers? You can only say AWS EC2 is worse than GCP. But you cannot compare whole platforms in one sentence.
  • cagataygurturk 10y ago
    Sorry for endless number of typos and mistakes. Obviously I was sleepy while I was writing this.
  • johansch 10y ago
    (Sorry, I'm late to reply, but since you addended your comment you might still be listening...) After spending a year evaluating both AWS and GCP (with an emphasis on their managed database services; both SQL and no-SQL) my general feeling is this: "Microsoft Windows is to Unix as AWS is to GCP". (Or perhaps closer to the truth: "VMS is to Unix as AWS is to GCP".) Baically AWS services seem like they are badly designed by buerocratic mediocre engineers following some bureocratic template for "a service". GCP feels a lot saner (both API- and UI/console-wise). I often got the feeling it's designed by people who: a) are smart and well-rounded in terms of experiences. It does take cleverness and experience to design something elegant that is also useful. b) take pride in their work (it does show) (And then, as a bonus: It's cheaper!)
    • cagataygurturk 10y ago
• cgag 10y ago
  Postgres on RDS
  • boulos 10y ago
    Come to NEXT in a week! :).
    • espeed 10y ago
      Any chance UDF iterators for Cloud Bigtable are in the works? Being able to run distributed D4M/GraphBLAS queries in Cloud Bigtable would be killer. "From NoSQL Accumulo to NewSQL Graphulo: Design and Utility of Graph Algorithms inside a BigTable Database" https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.07085.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.07085.pdf
• derefr 10y ago
  I think it's more, "if the service can't do what people need it to do, that's a problem; if the service cluster gets wedged hard enough to stop responding to the requests of our monitoring system, that's a failure." Which would make sense (and is sorta-kinda a best-practice) if Amazon wrote services such that they "crashed early"—but instead they're seemingly written so the backend lock up and be rendered completely useless at "doing its job" but will continue to run just fine. Either of those two design decisions is potentially a good thing on its own, but they need to be considered in light of one-another if you want your status page to make any sense. If you want to report cluster failures, code your clusters to actually fail. If you want to keep your clusters up, write your monitoring checks as whole-stack acceptance tests.
• notyourwork 10y ago
  > Seriously: I don't understand why you guys stay with AWS. You don't seem to have enough experience to comment on the issue.
  • johansch 10y ago
    Please visit this comment sub-tree: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13765786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13765786
    • notyourwork 10y ago
      That is a regurgitation of your opinion without any facts. Comparing technology and saying "it seems" or "i feel" isn't really a good argument to convince me one way or the other.