6 ms·

Well we already have Hetzner and OVH which are European so just being European does not give them a selling point over others.

iLoveOncall 3y ago
Neither are even remotely close to competing with AWS, GCP or Azure in terms of features though, they are more server providers than anything else. And OVH is a dumpster fire.
- naniwaduni 3y ago
  Not just the dumpsters, the datacenters too!
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    Was looking for this comment. On the bright side, it's easy to get lulled into a sense of complacency when you're running everything in the cloud, and OVH's massive data center fire had me double check all of our backup and disaster recovery processes (on a different provider) to ensure they were geographically distributed.
- mike_d 3y ago
  Which in itself is a massive selling feature. Deploying a simple app on AWS is about as straight forward as deploying Active Directory in the early 2000s. It is so bad Amazon even launched the Lightsail product line to address the problem. AWS now is basically "you don't know how to run a database, or a KV store, or a network, etc. so here it all is as an API with a markup." Some companies still have talent that knows how to run things efficiently and just need CPU, RAM, and storage.
  - iLoveOncall 3y ago
    It's not at all a selling point. You can do the same on AWS, get an EC2 and install everything there, that's it. The thing is that when you will need to leverage the other services of AWS, they will be there, while you will need to migrate if you're on one of those server providers.
    - benced 3y ago
      I never understood the complaints of complexity about AWS. You can easily just use EC2 and maybe S3 and ignore the other 100 icons. I think, in practice, what folks are complaining about is that AWS has the worst UI known to man. In which case, you can use GCP for their nice UI and still get the benefits of a hyperscaler. I don’t mean to say that the simpler services have no place in the market but it’s pretty narrow. The fact DO and Linode offer things like Kubernetes now is evidence of that.
      - mihaic 3y ago
        You're right that the UI is crap, but there's also another dynamic when you work in a team: some people may not be aware of complexity, and can create overengineered monsters just because they want to try the fancy stuff. That might suck, they leave their job, and you're stuck maintaining the monster.
      - justrealist 3y ago
        I honestly would not trust a developer who finds AWS too confusing. At least 80% of the "complexity" on AWS is to keep you from introducing catastrophic security vulnerabilities. When a developer starts whining they can't figure out how to use an IAM role, it usually means they want to run their entire application as a root user whose SSH key they have sitting in Dropbox. Stay away from my software please.
        smartinartin 3y ago
        As someone who spent five years as a consultant for two AWS pro partners, I agree with this anecdote. Day one of any gig when I started building with my clients was training on IAM and resource policies.
        DangitBobby 3y ago
        This is called Stockholm Syndrome and there are people who can help. AWS UI is filled with manual and tedious bullshit to do every day things. It really doesn't have to be this way, making things annoying to configure correctly leads to mistakes or lazy overly broad permissions. If they weren't the first they wouldn't have made it.
  - znpy 3y ago
    > AWS now is basically It’s literally in the name… web services.
- lelag 3y ago
  But they might be one of the greenest. OVH had to make some trade-off compared to other providers to remain as cheap as they are and while it certainly has an impact on their reliability and security levels, a lot of them are actually positive as far a sustainability goes (use of recycled containers, the use of wood in the DC which was decried when their DC burned down etc). To put it another way: a DC in a wooden shack connected to a low carbon grid (France) surely has bad security but a low environmental footprint too.
  - afandian 3y ago
    OVH may have sequestered a lot of carbon, but it was unexpectedly released.
- unmole 3y ago
  > Neither are even remotely close to competing with AWS, GCP or Azure in terms of features though And this Swedish startup is?
  - raverbashing 3y ago
    For that claim I'd base myself on two things: scale (even if forecasted but especially invested into), and compatibility with the main services (though some stuff in AWS is painful like IAM, etc so maybe it can be done better)
conradfr 3y ago
And Scaleway.
re-thc 3y ago
And Exoscale

iLoveOncall 3y ago

Neither are even remotely close to competing with AWS, GCP or Azure in terms of features though, they are more server providers than anything else. And OVH is a dumpster fire.

naniwaduni 3y ago
Not just the dumpsters, the datacenters too!
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  Was looking for this comment. On the bright side, it's easy to get lulled into a sense of complacency when you're running everything in the cloud, and OVH's massive data center fire had me double check all of our backup and disaster recovery processes (on a different provider) to ensure they were geographically distributed.
mike_d 3y ago
Which in itself is a massive selling feature. Deploying a simple app on AWS is about as straight forward as deploying Active Directory in the early 2000s. It is so bad Amazon even launched the Lightsail product line to address the problem. AWS now is basically "you don't know how to run a database, or a KV store, or a network, etc. so here it all is as an API with a markup." Some companies still have talent that knows how to run things efficiently and just need CPU, RAM, and storage.
- iLoveOncall 3y ago
  It's not at all a selling point. You can do the same on AWS, get an EC2 and install everything there, that's it. The thing is that when you will need to leverage the other services of AWS, they will be there, while you will need to migrate if you're on one of those server providers.
  - benced 3y ago
    I never understood the complaints of complexity about AWS. You can easily just use EC2 and maybe S3 and ignore the other 100 icons. I think, in practice, what folks are complaining about is that AWS has the worst UI known to man. In which case, you can use GCP for their nice UI and still get the benefits of a hyperscaler. I don’t mean to say that the simpler services have no place in the market but it’s pretty narrow. The fact DO and Linode offer things like Kubernetes now is evidence of that.
    - mihaic 3y ago
      You're right that the UI is crap, but there's also another dynamic when you work in a team: some people may not be aware of complexity, and can create overengineered monsters just because they want to try the fancy stuff. That might suck, they leave their job, and you're stuck maintaining the monster.
    - justrealist 3y ago
      I honestly would not trust a developer who finds AWS too confusing. At least 80% of the "complexity" on AWS is to keep you from introducing catastrophic security vulnerabilities. When a developer starts whining they can't figure out how to use an IAM role, it usually means they want to run their entire application as a root user whose SSH key they have sitting in Dropbox. Stay away from my software please.
      - smartinartin 3y ago
        As someone who spent five years as a consultant for two AWS pro partners, I agree with this anecdote. Day one of any gig when I started building with my clients was training on IAM and resource policies.
      - DangitBobby 3y ago
        This is called Stockholm Syndrome and there are people who can help. AWS UI is filled with manual and tedious bullshit to do every day things. It really doesn't have to be this way, making things annoying to configure correctly leads to mistakes or lazy overly broad permissions. If they weren't the first they wouldn't have made it.
- znpy 3y ago
  > AWS now is basically It’s literally in the name… web services.
lelag 3y ago
But they might be one of the greenest. OVH had to make some trade-off compared to other providers to remain as cheap as they are and while it certainly has an impact on their reliability and security levels, a lot of them are actually positive as far a sustainability goes (use of recycled containers, the use of wood in the DC which was decried when their DC burned down etc). To put it another way: a DC in a wooden shack connected to a low carbon grid (France) surely has bad security but a low environmental footprint too.
- afandian 3y ago
  OVH may have sequestered a lot of carbon, but it was unexpectedly released.
unmole 3y ago
> Neither are even remotely close to competing with AWS, GCP or Azure in terms of features though And this Swedish startup is?
- raverbashing 3y ago
  For that claim I'd base myself on two things: scale (even if forecasted but especially invested into), and compatibility with the main services (though some stuff in AWS is painful like IAM, etc so maybe it can be done better)

conradfr 3y ago

And Scaleway.

re-thc 3y ago

And Exoscale