
Ask HN: Which cloud do you use, and why? - Nelkins
Hey all,<p>The recent HN post on the &quot;$10 super computer&quot; (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9575683) was actually very timely, as I am working at a client in the financial space who is evaluating various IaaS providers (up until now they have been using a small on-site data center).  There is plenty information out there about which services are available, but less about why one should choose any particular provider over another.  I&#x27;m curious to hear about the experiences of the HN community on this, and especially from those who have used several different services.  What sealed the deal for you?  Was it the price?  Ecosystem of services?  Ease of use?  Was it the only thing available at the time? etc.  Would also love to hear about any other factors one should take into account when making this kind of decision.
======
davismwfl
AWS currently and for the last ~4 years. We have also placed more than a dozen
clients into AWS.

We have used SoftLayer, Peak10, Google and Azure at different times while
testing things out. SoftLayer we actually ran some processes in for about a
year.

I recently had posted on HN about services like DigitalOcean because there are
ways for us to save money using those types of services, or even Heroku. In
the end the ecosystem, ease of use, reliability (when architected right) and
flexibility of AWS is still just too powerful for us. The costs are not the
cheapest way we could do something, but when you factor in the minimal amount
of man hours we spend on infrastructure compared to what we could be, I think
it is a good deal. We try not to get too ingrained to AWS only features, and
where we do we will hide their implementation so we can switch them out if
ever needed. I also classify them differently too, for example, DynamoDB or
MySQL (via RDS) wouldn't be something I'd try to wrap, it is your database and
could be used from anywhere so you aren't really locked into AWS as much as
your database there. But something like SQS, we used but wrapped, and
eventually moved to RabbitMQ with very little extra effort.

I have had to use AWS support a few times, and they have been AMAZINGLY
helpful. And for non-critical things they usually answer forum posts pretty
quick too. AWS isn't a panacea with no issues, but for my money its the best
thing going right now. And they are constantly releasing new things and
tweaking things, not everything is for the better, but for the most part it
is.

------
benologist
Heroku for backend, automatically grow or shrink resources, nothing to
maintain, nothing to configure and tons of services available alongside it.

Netlify for frontend, it is a static hosting service with some neat features
like url rewriting that lets you proxy e.g. /api to a backend without
revealing api keys and under the same origin / domain.

What really draws me to this is:

\- no servers or software to maintain

\- horizontal scaling by design (heroku kind of forces it)

\- deploy process is "git push", fresh deploy is one click (heroku) and a few
mins doing config on netlify though they have an api so maybe that's redundant

\- no lock-in, easy to replicate locally

\- databases are managed wrt backups, recovery etc

\- entire front end is static and will scale indefinitely with massive uptime

[https://heroku.com/](https://heroku.com/)
[https://netlify.com/](https://netlify.com/)

~~~
pspeter3
Why netlify and not S3 + CloudFront?

~~~
benologist
The final outcome is the same - static files on a cdn - so it won't always
matter but netlify lets you:

1) run a build process

2) own domain with automatic ssl and redirecting to w/e www-or-not, https-only
etc

3) deploy with git push

4) url rewriting, header inserting, proxying

~~~
ChristianBach
Exactly, and because of the automatic URL rewriting Netlify will also give you
instant cache validation. So when you update your site, unlike most static
site hosts, you won't have to wait to see your changes live. But at the same
time you get a very cached and very fast site. So best of both worlds.

------
Avalaxy
Azure, awesome PaaS services, very easy to set up, good documentation, good
pricing, very good performance and I really like the fact that they are
working really really hard on Azure. Big new stuff is being released every
month.

~~~
at-fates-hands
Combining Azure with Cloudflare has really been great for my dozen or so
clients I manage.

It ups Azure's performance and adds another layer of excellent security. The
Pro plan at $20/month is well worth it.

------
lewisl9029
I'm using Azure.

Mostly because of this very little known offering called the Microsoft Action
Pack subscription:
[https://mspartner.microsoft.com/en/ca/Pages/Membership/actio...](https://mspartner.microsoft.com/en/ca/Pages/Membership/action-
pack.aspx)

It costs around $500 per year, offers your company access to a large number of
Microsoft software licenses, free access to seats of Office 365 Enterprise
(for hosted email on your own domain, in addition to the software), and most
importantly, $110 in Azure credits per month.

The Azure credits alone make this an amazing deal that essentially cuts all
Azure pricing by more than half, making it more than competitive with
AWS/GCE/DO on the pricing front.

~~~
jurymatic
I'm a current Azure user so this intrigued me, but I don't see anything on
that page about monthly credits. Am I missing something?

Edit: Never mind, I guess? I found it in some fine print on another page.
Weird that they don't advertise it more prominently...

~~~
lewisl9029
Yes it's pretty ridiculous how well they've hidden one of the best perks of
the subscription. I only know about it because I was enrolled in a previous
version of the program that advertised the Azure credits a lot more
prominently.

Their marketing in general is sorely lacking seeing as how few of the people
who would benefit from it actually know about it.

For anyone else wondering, I managed to find it mentioned on this page (deeply
hidden under "Microsoft Action Pack – cloud and on-premises Internal Use
Rights licenses" accordion, under the "Management" section in the dropdown,
under the "Cloud Services" heading):

[https://mspartner.microsoft.com/en/us/pages/membership/inter...](https://mspartner.microsoft.com/en/us/pages/membership/internal-
use-software.aspx)

"Microsoft Azure

US$100 monthly credit. Microsoft Azure credit is in addition to current on-
premises internal-use software licenses."

------
brianwawok
Digital Ocean

\- I only want to build off base Linux VM, I do not want to be locked into S3
+ SQS + ...

\- Price is right for young startups

\- Speed is nice

~~~
3pt14159
I just wish there was a single VM that wasn't SSD backed. I write web crawlers
sometimes and I usually only have to parse the HTML / JS _once_ into JSON or
SQL, but I like to keep the data backed up just in case I need to re-parse it
later, or to see the changes between crawls. It's completely impossible for me
to even fit it on their $640 / month box. But I love Digital Ocean for
everything else.

~~~
shortstuffsushi
Couldn't you potentially push that aspect elsewhere, into a data storage
solution like S3 or something (not sure of the cost efficiency, not a huge
cloud guy myself). Then you'd just be utilizing the DO server for processing.
It would have the added benefit of allowing you to scale your crawling
horizontally if you wanted, as all your servers could have access to the same
set of data.

~~~
3pt14159
Yeah I could, and I currently do - but I don't like to. I want the data on the
same network for lots of reasons and I also don't like maintaining two sets of
deployment systems. I'd prefer to just use Cloud66 + Digital Ocean and focus
on writing code, not setting up and maintaining servers.

~~~
shortstuffsushi
Oh yeah, I totally understand that, was just offering an alternative as a non-
ideal workaround. I have the same set up for a service I offer, primarily
because (afaik) it's hard to beat S3 pricing.

------
snehesht
[+] Digital Ocean

    
    
        Pros 1. Inexpensive, Pay as you go
             2. automated deployment
        Cons 1. Capped Network I/O
    

[+] Azure

    
    
        Pros 1. Cheap CDN, all-in-one cloud solutions
             2. Pay as you go
        Cons 1. Expensive VM's (0.6gb $13)
    

[3] RunAbove

    
    
        Pros 1. Inexpensive
        Cons 1. Not mature yet, they changed their pricing twice already

------
drzaiusapelord
Linode. Support is great, service is great, pricing is good, and seems less
"cowboyish" than Digital Ocean and others.

~~~
pan69
I've been running a VPN over multiple data centres on Linode for the past few
months. Seems to work great so far. The performance is good enough for what
I'm doing with it and I know exactly what my bill is going to be.

------
vyrotek
Microsoft Azure

\- The admin portal is great

\- Deploying to websites is just a simple push

\- I can programmatically spin up new SQL DB instances

\- I really like C#

\- There are a LOT of additional services available

\- Microsoft is very aggressive about keeping prices low

~~~
slg
I think Azure gets a bad reputation in this community from the old "Microsoft
= bad" bias that a lot of us have. However, if you are in a Windows stack
and/or a corporate developer (and that is a large but quiet percentage of
developers) it really seems like the best solution. Also the variety of
services they provide under one umbrella is neck and neck with Amazon for best
in the industry.

~~~
Gys
I wanted to try Azure a few weeks ago for a small project. But I found the UI
to be confusing. Part old and part new ? Trying to match up with the current
Windows look (which I am not familiar with) ?

I also had trouble using one of their API's. Got even thrown out very quickly
for abusing it. No idea why, just trying to access. Maybe MS does not like my
coding style :-) Never had something like that before. Reference to possible
explanation page did not work. Faq did not cover it. Still I got an automated
email a few days later to congratulate me with using Azure, while actually I
was locked out...

But I have no commitment to Windows, so its easy to switch. I normally use DO
and AWS and stick with them for now.

~~~
Avalaxy
If you really want to manage your Azure you'll have to go PowerShell anyway.

------
santoriv
Azure for the main infrastructure - I'm running a .NET MVC app and their Paas
offering is excellent.

I agree with the other comments about Azure's VM's being too expensive though.

Amazon S3 and Cloudfront b/c Azure CDN doesn't quite have all the features I
need.

------
jrs235
AWS - primarily S3 because their cloud storage is inexpensive and easy to
administer.

Azure - websites and mobile services (and by extension SQL Database) because
we use .NET

------
untog
AWS, because we make a lot of use of S3 - last I looked there weren't any
alternatives that truly rival it. Largely then end up using EC2 for cost (data
transfer in-data centre) and billing simplicity.

------
siquick
Used AWS for a couple of years but switch to DO and haven't looked back.

Great interface, pricing and service.

Their customer support is also awesome and I've found their support community
articles to be thoroughly useful.

[https://www.digitalocean.com/community/](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/)

------
hashtree
OVH, SoYouStart, and KimSufi with Dokku Alt (for quick apps) or custom
Ansible/Docker deployments (for big apps). Since OVH created their North
American DC I took the leap and have been very very happy. Knowing just how
cheap the hardware/ops game is, I just can't bring myself to spend anything
more than what these guys do:

    
    
      - $115/mn for a 64GB ECC, 3x Intel SSD, Xeon E51620v2, 500Mbps, etc
      - $50/mn for a 32GB ECC, Intel Xeon W3520, 4TB SATA
      - $15/mn for a 4GB RAM, Atom N2800, 1TB HDD
    

I scale differently as a result; huge gobs of RAM/SSD/CPU is easily within
reach. For instance, I can use Redis Cluster as a primary data store with then
op/s an order of magnitude higher than most might be used to.

------
thomasfoster96
I used to use Rackspace, but now I'm using AWS. Rackspace was nice, but AWS
was a bit better on price (thought the two are priced slightly differently)
and a secure setup was quicker on AWS than on Rackspace. I tend to use docs or
forums to solve issues I have, so Rackspace's customer support wasn't all that
useful compared to whatever Amazon offers.

Since then I've started using a few things like Elastic Beanstalk and
continuous deployment, and getting them working on AWS was pretty pain free
and easy. I don't think I could do as much on AWS now as I could on Rackspace.

Heroku looks nice but because of price I never tried it. Azure is also
tempting to use, but as a non-customer their non-Windows offerings seem to be
predictably second-rate.

~~~
thomasfoster96
All of that said, IaaS is still way too complicated. I'm sure there's room for
someone to come along and have an offering that's 10x simpler to manage and
use.

------
rsync
I have provided my own cloud, in the form of a 1U server, since 1998. I run my
(very tiny) website there as well as my own mailserver, and I read email over
SSH using (al)pine.

Backups offsite go to the obvious place :)

This setup might not be that interesting, but I think it's worth noting that a
cloud computing paradigm/model has functioned well for 16 years now with no
significant changes. I have not had data on my own personal computers for that
entire 16 years - all data has been in the "cloud".

I think a decent goal is to be a peer on the network. I think a good step in
that direction is to have your own server, with fixed IP, on the network. You
can build quite a bit on that.

~~~
at-fates-hands
I would love to do this, but handling the security of your own server to me
seems labor intensive.

How easy is it for you to manage keeping your server and data secure? I would
really like to do this, but my fears of getting hacked have kept me from doing
it.

~~~
rsync
Well, my system runs nothing but sendmail, lighttpd (with no modules or
features) and sshd. That's it. So there's not much to lock down.

sshd is hidden behind port knocking, for what that's worth. (No, I do not want
to have a religious argument about port knocking this morning)

The real key to the simplicity and security of my setup is email over SSH with
a console client. Not only does that remove _oceans_ of attack surface, but it
also means you can read email without the emails themselves traversing the
network. I guess the characters go over SSH, but that's not quite the same
thing...

~~~
xtrumanx
Thank you for introducing me to port knocking (wikipedia link for the
unintiated [0]).

Not trying to lure into an argument you're trying to avoid but I'm just
curious; what is the religious argument about regarding port knocking? I know
about both sides to tabs/spaces and vim/emacs but am curious what people have
against port knocking.

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_knocking](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_knocking)

~~~
rsync
Heh.

In short, port knocking is a very, very short/weak password. And is a very
weak authentication measure.

This is absolutely true and nobody could argue that.

So if you only did port knocking, or if you _depended_ on port knocking,
you're making a bad decision.

I believe in defense in depth, and therefore I think that port knocking _on
top of everything else you already do_ has good value - especially considering
how simple and lightweight knockd is and my experience of it running stably
for _years_ at a time.

------
geori
Rackspace

\- pricing and offerings are similar to AWS

\- they answer the phone when you have problems

~~~
fraXis
Their support is first rate and the #1 reason I won't change to another
provider. There is nothing better than opening a chat window and having
someone who is knowledgeable respond and who can get the problem fixed right
away. To me that is worth the premium I pay for using Rackspace over a service
like Azure or AWS.

~~~
smacktoward
I've been a big Rackspace Cloud user and advocate here on HN and elsewhere for
6+ years now. This line of thinking was exactly why.

However, in the last year, my experience has been that the quality of support
has collapsed. It _used_ to be I could open a chat window and get a
knowledgeable person who could fix my problem, but that's not the case
anymore. Now I get someone who either doesn't understand what I'm saying or
tells me they can't do anything to help unless I upgrade to their gold-plated,
top-of-the-line support tier, which would push them from "somewhat more
expensive" to "absurdly expensive." It's gotten so bad that I'm in the process
of moving all my systems off their cloud at the moment. I can't in good
conscience recommend them anymore.

It's all very disappointing, as quality support has been Rackspace's key
differentiator forever. My guess is that they've decided to give up competing
with AWS on the high end and Digital Ocean et al on the low end, and
concentrate on selling into Fortune 500s who need basic VPS services and are
willing to pay out the nose for them. But that leaves small shops like mine
out in the cold, which is too bad.

------
4ad
Joyent.

\+ DTrace available

\+ Great predictable performance

\+ Solaris

\+ no VM

\+ fast non-capped network

\- client tools are written in node.js (but you can write your own if you
really care)

Doesn't matter to me, but might to some people:

\- Relatively few datacenters

\- Solaris (they do have KVM too, so you can run whatever, but then you lose
the many benefits of zones)

Also don't matter to me, but might to some people:

\+ completely open source stack, so you could install the same environment in
your private datacenter

\+ it does not use openstack

------
lmm
I use AWS:

\- Everything integrates with it, there's a lot of tooling

\- Safety of the herd

------
woohoo7676
Using Azure currently:

\- Good PaaS offerings and pretty easy to setup

\- Bizspark ($150 free of services per month per account (and yo u can create
up to 5 accounts) for 3 years)

\- Decent speed (Azure SQL used to be a dog, but has gotten a bit better with
the V12 updates)

------
deet
AWS, because it's what I know to be productive with from previous work. In the
early stages of my current business I cannot afford to take the time to learn
anything else.

With AWS I know the two biggest risks to its use are vendor lock-in and cost.
Vendor lock-in is easy to mitigate early on through wise tech choices, and
cost is something to mitigate later at scale when it matters more. And it
preserves the option to use those additional, propriety services if at some
point it is deemed worth the lock-in risk.

------
ZainRiz
A good first question to ask is what are your needs?

Do you just need to host a web site with some storage? If you're looking at an
ecosystem which services interest you?

You might find this article useful: [http://www.troyhunt.com/2015/02/stories-
from-trenches-sizing...](http://www.troyhunt.com/2015/02/stories-from-
trenches-sizing-and-penny.html)

[Dislaimer: I'm a dev in the Azure Web Apps (was called Azure Websites) team]

------
gmac
Historically, Linode. Good performance, and decent value.

More recently, Heroku. Expensive, but I love being able to leave the sysadmin
to someone else.

~~~
jerhinesmith
I set up my first rails app on Linode about 5 years ago and used to scoff at
people that went the "easy" route with Heroku.

Now I'm using Heroku and wonder why I wasted so much time before worrying
about disk space, permissions, rotating logs, etc. I definitely get it now.

------
blfr
I use RunAbove[1] usually. Mostly because it's nearby (low latency), based on
OpenStack (opensource and all the tools works ootb), and inexpensive.

[1] [https://www.runabove.com/](https://www.runabove.com/)

~~~
sfilipov
Looks too cheap. For how long have you used them and is all your experience
positive. Their $/GB RAM is more than twice cheaper than DigitalOcean which
are already quite cheap (compared to AWS and the like). Apparent downside of
RunAbove is that the ration of cores to memory is lower.

~~~
blfr
It's OVH, the largest hosting provider in Europe. Cheap is their thing.

I have been using RunAbove specifically since October. It's fine. Even the
sandbox instances.

------
Blackthorn
I've used Google Compute Engine to host new web sites. It's cheap, it's rock
solid.

I'm still running my fairly large wiki on Linode, just because I haven't had
the time to properly migrate it to Compute Engine.

------
dbrianwhipple
Cycligent.com - layers on top of AWS. Allows for multiple simultaneous
versions of an app on the same URL. Also, the easiest deployment I have ever
seen.

------
mbesto
If I have a standard Rails app then Heroku. For anything more complicated it's
either DO or AWS. All services on AWS (R53, S3, SES, etc)

------
steelframe
Google Compute Engine. Their Cloud Security team is staffed with rock stars in
the industry.

------
ic-junk
Microsoft Azure

\+ Admin portal is good

\+ Git Deploy to "Websites" is slick with no setup (builds binaries)

\+ NodeJS / C#

\+ Azure Integration in Visual Studio

\+ Aggressive pricing

The other reason is there are other services that I can use if I don't want to
build my own.

~~~
chrisseaton
Are you posting exactly the same comment multiple times with slightly
different wording and a new user account each time?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9583236](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9583236)

~~~
denzil_correa
I think the user just copy-pasted the linked comment. The linked comment
account is quite old - 2487 days.

~~~
ic-junk
No copy and pasting. 2 Different users posting around the same time. We just
had same experiences. Mine was originally all in one sentence but I edited it
after and reformatted to be bullet points.

~~~
johnmaguire2013
The same points, in the same order, in the same hour.

~~~
ic-junk
It was within 5 min of me posting. It wasn't displayed when I was typing mine
in. I don't have the same points. I didn't even mention SQL DB because I don't
use it. I see I also mentioned NodeJS where they didn't. I also talked about
Azure integration in Visual Studio and they didn't. These points are quite
typical for Azure users.

