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This would be one of inherient difference between smaller vs. giga players in cloud hosting. AWS/Google/Azure, if this happens, there should only be limited ou

This would be one of inherient difference between smaller vs. giga players in cloud hosting. AWS/Google/Azure, if this happens, there should only be limited outage to a small fraction of customers. As a matter of fact, Google had such an incident before, and literally no customers (internal and external) noticed.

ev1 6y ago
This is an apples to oranges comparison. OVH largely sells bare metal; their public cloud wasn't really impacted. If you are using AWS, Google, or Azure, ran a single (or multiple machines) inside a single AZ with no backups and opted out of snapshots, you would face the exact same situation. I can definitely say I see people complaining about how everything they have is down on AWS when us-east-1 goes down periodically, while large players that deploy sanely like Netflix fail over to another region seamlessly. This [only owning a single machine at all] is what most of their customers whinging the most were doing. People that have actual sane production workloads on AWS or GCP are not going to be running 100% of their workload on a single EC2 instance with no backups. People that are running on OVH are running often things like gameservers etc that monopolise 100% of a physical machine and don't support horizontal scaling. You quite literally cannot force a srcds/hlds server to "load balance" dynamically and fail over on heartbeat. Often they are kids or students too, and the $30/m for a machine with 32-64GB ram is all they can afford (though this doesn't absolve them of paying $1-2/m more for offsite backups elsewhere) You can provision more physical machines with the OVH API and have them be up in a different city in a minute or two. You get linespeed bandwidth between OVH DCs. It's up to you to use it.
- justicezyx 6y ago
  Oh good to know. I don't use OvH, and my limited understanding were from their products page which lists VM style offerings. I had assumed VMs were the major use cases on OvH.
  - ev1 6y ago
    The pricing on their dedicated servers are cheaper than most 1-2GB VMs on cloud: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/bare-metal/ https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/bare-metal/ - this is their flagship and most expensive brand, the cheaper ones are even less The funniest tweets demanding their data and saying they'll lose everything are the people running: https://twitter.com/Sensity_RP/status/1369496048998223873 https://twitter.com/Sensity_RP/status/1369496048998223873 - GTA5 multiplayer gameserver that begs for donations. Running on one of the cheaper sub-brands of OVH probably (soyoustart, for GAME ddos-protection). $30-40/machine. https://twitter.com/pdfshift/status/1369550522479480833 https://twitter.com/pdfshift/status/1369550522479480833 - I can't tell if this is a troll https://twitter.com/KatsanosAlex/status/1369501497348812801 https://twitter.com/KatsanosAlex/status/1369501497348812801 - I can't tell if this is a troll
    - gowld 6y ago
      I can imagine a provider that offers "Disaster Recovery Plan" in the sense that you push a button and they spin up [whatever machines you subscribe to] in a different data center and restore your latest backup to it. Or the button flips your DNS from your usual primary servers to a hot backup (or a cold backup that you brought online yourself).
- jonas21 6y ago
  On the other hand, just about every month, there's a story on HN saying why are you wasting your money on AWS when OVH is so much cheaper (for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24966028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24966028). And well, I guess this is one of the reasons.
  - kazen44 6y ago
    how so? using OVH and their bare metal servers doesn't absolve you from doing your own due dilligence. As said earlier, their cloud service is unaffected.
  - ev1 6y ago
    If you choose to run 100% of your workload on a single EC2 VM in us-east-chaos-monkey and put nothing in S3, only local mounted block storage that also disappears when you reboot your on-demand EC2, that is on you.
    - kuschku 6y ago
      2 OVH dedicated servers in different countries are still cheaper than one AWS instance. e.g. I've got servers at OVH SBG-2, Hetzner's Falckenstein, and Online.net's AMS datacenters — the total of which is still almost a magnitude less than the same cost on AWS or GCP (granted, that's including traffic)
      - ev1 6y ago
        Pretty much. Use 5% of the money you saved moving your workload from AWS to OVH to support failover, DR, and backups. You can probably buy like five or six machines of equivalent spec or more.
        tmikaeld 6y ago
        Not only that, but the OVH load balancer (API gateway) is enormously much cheaper at 2TB of traffic than AWS and they don't charge for the amount of requests.
jeffbee 6y ago
I can't even find any press articles about the Google incident.
- Nomikos 6y ago
  Are you googling? ;-)
- londons_explore 6y ago
  At the time that Google data center was not known to be owned by Google. So it will just be "fire in industrial estate"
Saris 6y ago
It also depends if you're renting a dedicated server, vs cloud/VPS. AWS/Google/Azure deal with virtualized systems that can be moved around to another server easily. OVH has a lot of dedicated servers as well though, so if you're using one of those then it can't be moved very easily to avoid downtime.
- dilyevsky 6y ago
  Just to note - only google does live migration (with ~100ms blackout) with others you will take some downtime anyway (assuming the remaining zones even have enough capacity to fit everyone)
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    Google never migrates to a different physical location, so it wouldn't actually protect against a whole class of issues (major flooding, war, employee strike, etc)
    - dilyevsky 6y ago
      Zones are often in separate locations but only within a few miles so yeah. Also i think they won’t even migrate inter-zone so there’s that
stefan_ 6y ago
This is a difference in what you are buying. When you are buying a dedicated server, there isn't exactly a good way to hide that the thing has just gone up in smokes. When you buy a storage API, sure, failure rates go up, latency increases 100x, but after a few hours its probably back to normal. Of course, with the increased abstraction, you get more problems. "Availability zones" are useless when most cloud outages are because of configuration or systemic issues that tend to bring the whole thing down, no matter which AZ you are. But apparently it's now considered "good enough" to just go "oh we are down because AWS is down".
- bauruine 6y ago
  AWS is the new IBM. Nobody ever got fired for using AWS.
  - greggyb 6y ago
    And funny enough, it's now considered crazy to do a hardware startup, even if staffed up with industry vets. The reaction to Oxide is funny to watch, especially.
- tormeh 6y ago
  If you're in with the big cloud providers you have no choice. Hybrid cloud is economically impossible due to the bandwidth costs. Yet somehow, at smaller providers and dedicated hosters bandwidth is usually included as a too-cheap-to-meter feature. Gotta love cloud innovation.
  - gowld 6y ago
    Bandwidth is cheap until you run out and then it's very expensive.

ev1 6y ago

This is an apples to oranges comparison. OVH largely sells bare metal; their public cloud wasn't really impacted. If you are using AWS, Google, or Azure, ran a single (or multiple machines) inside a single AZ with no backups and opted out of snapshots, you would face the exact same situation. I can definitely say I see people complaining about how everything they have is down on AWS when us-east-1 goes down periodically, while large players that deploy sanely like Netflix fail over to another region seamlessly. This [only owning a single machine at all] is what most of their customers whinging the most were doing. People that have actual sane production workloads on AWS or GCP are not going to be running 100% of their workload on a single EC2 instance with no backups. People that are running on OVH are running often things like gameservers etc that monopolise 100% of a physical machine and don't support horizontal scaling. You quite literally cannot force a srcds/hlds server to "load balance" dynamically and fail over on heartbeat. Often they are kids or students too, and the $30/m for a machine with 32-64GB ram is all they can afford (though this doesn't absolve them of paying $1-2/m more for offsite backups elsewhere) You can provision more physical machines with the OVH API and have them be up in a different city in a minute or two. You get linespeed bandwidth between OVH DCs. It's up to you to use it.

justicezyx 6y ago
Oh good to know. I don't use OvH, and my limited understanding were from their products page which lists VM style offerings. I had assumed VMs were the major use cases on OvH.
- ev1 6y ago
  The pricing on their dedicated servers are cheaper than most 1-2GB VMs on cloud: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/bare-metal/ https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/bare-metal/ - this is their flagship and most expensive brand, the cheaper ones are even less The funniest tweets demanding their data and saying they'll lose everything are the people running: https://twitter.com/Sensity_RP/status/1369496048998223873 https://twitter.com/Sensity_RP/status/1369496048998223873 - GTA5 multiplayer gameserver that begs for donations. Running on one of the cheaper sub-brands of OVH probably (soyoustart, for GAME ddos-protection). $30-40/machine. https://twitter.com/pdfshift/status/1369550522479480833 https://twitter.com/pdfshift/status/1369550522479480833 - I can't tell if this is a troll https://twitter.com/KatsanosAlex/status/1369501497348812801 https://twitter.com/KatsanosAlex/status/1369501497348812801 - I can't tell if this is a troll
  - gowld 6y ago
    I can imagine a provider that offers "Disaster Recovery Plan" in the sense that you push a button and they spin up [whatever machines you subscribe to] in a different data center and restore your latest backup to it. Or the button flips your DNS from your usual primary servers to a hot backup (or a cold backup that you brought online yourself).
jonas21 6y ago
On the other hand, just about every month, there's a story on HN saying why are you wasting your money on AWS when OVH is so much cheaper (for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24966028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24966028). And well, I guess this is one of the reasons.
- kazen44 6y ago
  how so? using OVH and their bare metal servers doesn't absolve you from doing your own due dilligence. As said earlier, their cloud service is unaffected.
- ev1 6y ago
  If you choose to run 100% of your workload on a single EC2 VM in us-east-chaos-monkey and put nothing in S3, only local mounted block storage that also disappears when you reboot your on-demand EC2, that is on you.
  - kuschku 6y ago
    2 OVH dedicated servers in different countries are still cheaper than one AWS instance. e.g. I've got servers at OVH SBG-2, Hetzner's Falckenstein, and Online.net's AMS datacenters — the total of which is still almost a magnitude less than the same cost on AWS or GCP (granted, that's including traffic)
    - ev1 6y ago
      Pretty much. Use 5% of the money you saved moving your workload from AWS to OVH to support failover, DR, and backups. You can probably buy like five or six machines of equivalent spec or more.
      - tmikaeld 6y ago
        Not only that, but the OVH load balancer (API gateway) is enormously much cheaper at 2TB of traffic than AWS and they don't charge for the amount of requests.

jeffbee 6y ago

I can't even find any press articles about the Google incident.

Nomikos 6y ago
Are you googling? ;-)
londons_explore 6y ago
At the time that Google data center was not known to be owned by Google. So it will just be "fire in industrial estate"

Saris 6y ago

It also depends if you're renting a dedicated server, vs cloud/VPS. AWS/Google/Azure deal with virtualized systems that can be moved around to another server easily. OVH has a lot of dedicated servers as well though, so if you're using one of those then it can't be moved very easily to avoid downtime.

dilyevsky 6y ago
Just to note - only google does live migration (with ~100ms blackout) with others you will take some downtime anyway (assuming the remaining zones even have enough capacity to fit everyone)
- londons_explore 6y ago
  Google never migrates to a different physical location, so it wouldn't actually protect against a whole class of issues (major flooding, war, employee strike, etc)
  - dilyevsky 6y ago
    Zones are often in separate locations but only within a few miles so yeah. Also i think they won’t even migrate inter-zone so there’s that

stefan_ 6y ago

This is a difference in what you are buying. When you are buying a dedicated server, there isn't exactly a good way to hide that the thing has just gone up in smokes. When you buy a storage API, sure, failure rates go up, latency increases 100x, but after a few hours its probably back to normal. Of course, with the increased abstraction, you get more problems. "Availability zones" are useless when most cloud outages are because of configuration or systemic issues that tend to bring the whole thing down, no matter which AZ you are. But apparently it's now considered "good enough" to just go "oh we are down because AWS is down".

bauruine 6y ago
AWS is the new IBM. Nobody ever got fired for using AWS.
- greggyb 6y ago
  And funny enough, it's now considered crazy to do a hardware startup, even if staffed up with industry vets. The reaction to Oxide is funny to watch, especially.
tormeh 6y ago
If you're in with the big cloud providers you have no choice. Hybrid cloud is economically impossible due to the bandwidth costs. Yet somehow, at smaller providers and dedicated hosters bandwidth is usually included as a too-cheap-to-meter feature. Gotta love cloud innovation.
- gowld 6y ago
  Bandwidth is cheap until you run out and then it's very expensive.