Ask HN: Which cloud provider to use in 2018? Azure, AWS, GCE, something else? - chespinoza
======
benthehenten
At LogRocket ([https://logrocket.com](https://logrocket.com)) we've been on
GCP for ~2 years and have been extremely satisfied. Some reasons in
particular:

\- "Infinitely scalable" services like Bigtable and Cloud Pub/Sub have helped
us scale extremely quickly to support large clients.

\- The durability of Cloud Pub/Sub was particularly important early on as it
served as a fail safe when our consumers would go down

\- Aggressive discounts for committed use. For our particular workload we've
calculated AWS could be as much as 10% more expensive

\- Dashboard developer experience and UX is more approachable than AWS

~~~
ZeroCool2u
After I graduated in December, I was hired as a consultant for the company I
was interning with on and off the past couple years. I was tasked with
automating and migrating as much of our workflow as possible onto a hosted
solution.

After trying out AWS and GCP, we settled on GCP for a few reasons in addition
to what benthehenten outlined.

\- Development experience is great, docs are on point.

\- BigQuery is fantastic. It let me seamlessly hand off an interface to a full
time employee that had experience with SQL without the overhead of them having
to learn a whole lot more.

\- Custom VM's provide us with the flexibility to get exactly what we need to
run our workloads, no more, no less.

\- TPU's though not generally available at the time, were something we knew
we'd want to take advantage of in the future. Because we're a TensorFlow shop,
it just made sense.

------
Mister_Snuggles
What do you want out of the cloud provider? Do you want the value-add services
(e.g., AWS Lambda, S3, etc)? Or do you just want Linux machines, virtual or
otherwise, that you can run your own stuff on?

It seems to me that you should start with your requirements, then figure out
which provider best meets your needs.

~~~
jasonkostempski
False. Black bear.

~~~
malux85
What does that mean? And can you elaborate? (I agree with Mister_Snuggles but
would like to hear reasoned counter arguments)

~~~
delta1
He's trying to be funny by quoting The Office

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsGnFExpup8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsGnFExpup8)

------
tgtweak
I would suggest using some portable tools to keep your options open. It's
getting increasingly easy to go for he candy and get locked in.

I think the pricing model of gcp makes a lot of sense. I'm also under the
impression that gcp has faster networking and storage, but haven't quantified
this.

AWS has the most offerings, and it seems like their momentum will be difficult
to catch from a development standpoint. Of the big 3, AWS is likely the one
with the least internal use, which isn't a bad thing - they build features for
costumers more than releasing features they build for themselves.

Azure is in a different market but provides a very good Platform for the
Microsoft ecosystem and it's impressively coordinated.

We use all 3, as well as on premise and private cloud. Each is better for
different things. Zerotier is your friend for multi-cloud liberty.

~~~
sharemywin
I was under the impression they were moving to platform independence.

Deploying a Python Website to Azure with Docker

[http://www.jamessturtevant.com/posts/Deploying-Python-
Websit...](http://www.jamessturtevant.com/posts/Deploying-Python-Website-To-
Azure-Web-with-Docker/)

"Azure Web Apps for Linux using python"

~~~
tgtweak
Docker and kube are a godsend for portability.

Hashicorp's terraform is also deserving of some contribution to this space.

Softether is the last necessity in my cloud-agnostic toolkit.

------
bootsz
Entirely depends on your use case most likely. While thus far I've mostly only
used these services for side projects & academic research, I will say that I
found Google Cloud to be the easiest to use by far for a casual / new user.
The quality of the tooling, UIs, libraries, and documentation is just
exceptional. I've found getting most things up and running there is a breeze
and downright enjoyable, which sharply contrasts to my experiences using other
services.

------
throwaway985325
Don't use AWS, or at least don't put all your eggs into the AWS basket.

AWS has gotten to the service and infrastructure footprint it has today by
death marching mediocre talent to ship untested and brittle things. This is
true all the way down into the physical infrastructure, which often breaks and
causes regional havoc. Great examples from the last 6 months include the 40
minute outage in US-WEST-2 in September, or the several hour event in US-
EAST-1 during the East Coast wind storms. Bubble gum and baling wire.

They're trying to stabilize things, but leadership and sales are often
committing to large spend customers and financing new features with technical
debt (when current technical debt is not being serviced). Those at the top are
not really concerned with running a solid or innovative platform as much as
just pure growth and revenue.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _Great examples from the last 6 months include the 40 minute outage in US-
> WEST-2 in September, or the several hour event in US-EAST-1 during the East
> Coast wind storms. Bubble gum and baling wire._

Were other non-Amazon companies impacted directly by the storms? I have no
idea where Microsoft and Google cloud server farms live, but it's a bit of a
stretch to say that a major weather event causing downtime is due to "bubble
gum and bailing wire". You could be right - I don't know anything about their
setup - but "throwaway985325" isn't exactly a trustworthy source.

~~~
throwaway985325
I work on an internal service, and my weekly metrics reflect the health of a
lot of services. It's more often than not that those metrics look like a
printout from a seismograph sitting on an active fault.

I don't know if other cloud providers were impacted, but I'm willing to bet
they were not impacted intermittently for 6 hours.

------
meddlepal
What are your requirements? Honestly they all do the essentials pretty well.
AWS has the largest tooling ecosystem, but that's because it had 1st mover
advantage.

Your requirements and architecture are going to guide this decision pretty
heavily. Do you run on VM's or use Kubernetes? If you use Kubernetes how well
abstracted from the infrastructure cloud are you? Well abstracted... any of
them will suffice (AWS doesn't have a hosted Kubernetes option yet though...
coming this year supposedly).

------
lars_francke
In my opinion as long as the basic functionality that you need is offered it
doesn't really matter that much which one you chose.

I'd look more for non-functional requirements: What do the skills in your team
look like, do you have a relationship with one of the cloud providers, can you
get the quotas/limits you need in the regions you need, what cost are they,
what are other people using in the same field (makes it easier to find help),
can you get free credits somewhere, how worried are you about vendor lock-
in[1] etc.

None of the big ones will go away anytime soon.

[1] [https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/21/17146308/microsoft-
wunder...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/21/17146308/microsoft-wunderlist-
to-do-app-acquisition-complicated)

------
rataerix
It might be worth mentioning that Digital Ocean has added features recently
that now put it more on the level GCE, AWS, Azure. It is still pretty basic
but has added firewalls and object storage and it is pretty good prices. It
would of course depend on your needs though.

------
estsauver
We use AWS and are pretty happy with them.

The other truth is that once you're on a platform, as long as you're pretty
happy, you're not really going to switch. It's just not the most important
thing for your business usually. GCE sure looks like it has some neat stuff,
but I'd have to be crazy to derail the other important tech work we have for
an infrastructure change like that.

------
zachruss92
So I think it all really depends on what you're looking to build. From a
feature perspective, AWS is much more mature than GCE or Azure but all of
those feature come at a price.

As an example, the AWS Lambda ecosystem is much more mature than Google Cloud
Functions with a wider language support, Lambda on Edge, API Gateway, etc...

With that being said, my go-to cloud is Google. They support all of the "big"
features I need and is priced more fairly - especially for growing businesses.
What I really like is how their reservation system works, instead of reserving
entire instances, you can reserve cores/ram for a period of 1-3 years. Many
business workloads its impossible to project compute needs 1-3 years out, with
Google you don't have to because you can apply the cores/ram you reserve in
any configuration you want (including GKE which is really nice).

------
sidcool
My money is on GCE.

~~~
dullgiulio
One annoying (but perhaps understandable) thing of GCE is that in the EU you
need to have a VAT number to use any of it, even if only for free tiers.

~~~
jankeymeulen
We (finally) changed that:
[https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/resources/vat-
overview...](https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/resources/vat-
overview#individual_accounts_in_eu)

------
wink
At my old company we moved from AWS to GCP mid-2017 - and I honestly can't
remember a single major bad thing about it, just two minor ones[0][1].

It was cheaper, the VMs performed better, the GUI was better (we heavily used
Terraform, but as we just started on GCP, we still used the cloud console
quite heavily, to doublecheck, etc)

But! there's surely a bit of bias involved, as we did this as greenfield
migration project where we did everything the correct[tm] way with instance
groups for scaling etc, whereas the old AWS setup was organically grown.
Neither setups had auto-scaling, but on GCP it was really low-friction to
scale manually.

[0]: pro: live migrations work / contra: there's NTP clock skew when
migrating, this alerted us a few times when we noticed

[1]: terraform and some other tooling didn't yet support 100% of stuff, so we
had to file a few bugs/PRs (iirc)

------
nrjames
We use Google Cloud and I'm really pleased with it. The team often adds useful
new features and are pretty accessible through support. Perhaps most
importantly right now, they're working hard to put in place to help people
manage GDPR compliance issues, which is saving us a lot of time.

------
morpheuskafka
If you are a nonprofit, AWS is amazingly generous. My FIRST Robotics team was
given a $500 grant to develop a scouting system. We mostly use EC2 but the
breath of services is shocking, most services can be run absolutely free with
S3/CloudFront with free SSL and edge computing with Lambda--meanwhile,
CloudFront is trying to charge $1/mo for "edge workers" that only run in one
language. Although a VPS company like Linode or DigitalOcean have lower prices
than EC2, they don't have the machine types, CLI, SDK languages, and
integrated CDN. If your concerned about data transfer pricing, fire up a $5/mo
Lightsail VM as a load balancer/reverse proxy--free 1TB data out.

~~~
chrisgoman
Microsoft Azure gives $5,000/yr credits to non-profits.
[https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/nonprofits/azure](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/nonprofits/azure) Also a
non-combinable $5/mo for Office 365 E5

------
scardine
For small projects I like to start with something flat-fee like Linode or
DigitalOcean - having to worry about variable costs is a distraction.

I just registered a wildcard SSL certificate using the DO plugin from
LetsEncrypt and it worked like a charm.

------
mectors
Some criteria: Bread of services, innovations, ecosystem: AWS Microsoft
technology focus,ease of use: Azure Fast global networking, Kubernetes,
Tensorflow: GCE Cheap servers: challengers Niche: ARM servers - Scaleway, ...

~~~
anxman
Language clarification: GCE refers to Google Compute Engine and GCP is the
Google Cloud Platform.

------
adius
DigitalOcean. A little more bare bones than the cloud providers, but really
easy to use and great (community) documentation. They also have a great set of
predefined images which can be deployed in seconds.

~~~
mattferderer
Last time I used their predefined images (a year ago), I found many were
severely outdated. Are they any better now?

If you want predefined images, I've found using Docker Hub to be a better
starting point even if you don't use Docker.

Aside from that they're a great host.

------
datums
Depends on your needs. Some larger organizations will have multiple providers
for business continuity, multi region is not enough. The smaller organization
might decided on a cloud , solely based on pricing. AWS is the giant, followed
by Azure and GCE is 3rd. Depending on your orchestration tools, why choose one
:) as long as you don't lock yourself into a specific service, you should be
able to switch across cloud compute. If you're not using AWS, get the free
trial, kick the tires.

------
hacknat
Whichever provider gives you the most credits. Seriously, all the clouds are
cheap, and provide basically the same service. I would say AWS is more
configurable than the rest, but GCE is probably easier to use.

In terms of stability AWS is probably the winner. GCE has had a multi-region
failure within the last ~2 years, AWS hasn’t seen a multi-region failure in
the last decade.

------
marksomnian
Anything, as long as it has managed Kubernetes. It lets your applications be
(somewhat) cloud-independent. Of course if you use value added services (AWS
APi Gateway, GCP PubSub etc.) this is less useful, but if you're just running
containers on Linux this is truly the future.

------
xtrapolate
You'll need to define a clear set of criteria. All of the aforementioned
providers have similarities, and differences. Requirements, costs, SLA,
support, availability, APIs, redundancy... it's an infinite list that you'll
have to narrow down yourself.

------
3pt14159
If you don't need the more enterprise-y cloud features of something like AWS,
then I highly recommend DigitalOcean. Responsive support, excellent API,
excellent design, good feature set without getting bloated like AWS.

For backups, I use Backblaze B2 and love it too.

------
adventured
I wouldn't advocate them as a replacement for something like AWS or GCE - with
that said, I'm really enjoying Vultr. I've found my experience with them
comparable to DigitalOcean.

------
nathan_f77
I've just finished a migration from Heroku to AWS, managed by Convox. I would
highly recommend it: [https://convox.com](https://convox.com)

------
fazza99
I'll never use GCE again. Too many services get pulled on a whim.

~~~
deesix
Disclosure: I work on GCP

To understand, what services got pulled? we have a very long deprecation
policy and I can't think of anything that has been removed in the last couple
of years.

------
njsubedi
I would refer Scaleway if you can set up your applications yourself. Using it
for a year now and seen them only get better. Price and readymade images are
what I like the most about them.

~~~
hakanderyal
Scaleway is really cheap, especially if you don't care much about CPU speed.
But reliability is the problem. Every few weeks one of my machines becomes
unreachable, requiring manual hard restart from the control panel.

------
nwhatt
Probably depends on what stage the company is at. You could have tons of
credits from being in an accelerator, or you could be so large you need to
spread risk out over multiple clouds.

~~~
itake
Could you elaborate on what you would recommend for what stage?

~~~
mseebach
If you have loads of credit for a cloud? _That_ cloud. If you need to spread
out risk? All of them.

~~~
pandemicsyn
If you have loads of credit for a cloud, you can usually get the others to
match. Definitely use those credits to try and align with the solution your
team has experience with/prefers.

------
bluszcz
Depends what services are you after to. If you are into "serverless" \- than
from my experience most robust/integrated environment is being provided by
AWS...

------
zoinkss
None, because the CLOUD act tells us that you'll be exposing everything that
happens on your provider's platform to prying eyes.

Just like Facebook? No, slightly worse.

------
zaphodq42
guys please read my experience with GCP here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16658339](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16658339)

GCP is not an option for me. Please anyone who has used aws elastic beanstalk
share your experience.

------
parweb
[https://zeit.co](https://zeit.co)

------
rfolstad
Cheap vps with aws cloudfront in front of it.

------
dovik
Anyone using Cloudways ? Any comments ?

------
ojr
AWS Elastic Beanstalk

------
fwgwgwgch
You will not hear much about azure because of the clear anti-ms bias here but
give it a try if you want end-to-end automation for everything including
spinning machines and dB instances (and my experience is it is at par with was
in terms of stability, although this was a comparison for a brief time and
hard to quantify)

