
Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS? - bachback
AWS has captured an enormous market. As a user I&#x27;m surprised there are only few serious contenders (cloud provider with an API and global footprint). Digitalocean has managed to captured the low end of the spectrum for people looking to run a few servers. Any serious alternatives to AWS today? Google App engine is still closely tied to there way of doing things.
======
vayarajesh
Google cloud - I have recently been working on setting up our company's entire
infrastructure on google cloud and we were up and running in no time (very
happy currently).

\- Great pricing

\- Great API (command line, REST)

\- Nearly perfect documentation

\- Awesome support (I had requested to allow more static ip addresses to be
reserved and they resolved my ticket in less than 4 hours)

\- Very intuitive interface

They give you $300 free credits before setting up billing account for you to
try the entire cloud for free. You can play around with google cloud with up
to 8 VMs

They also have App engine and Container engine to manage your applications /
containers at scale.

Other simple cloud features include - storage buckets, snapshots, VPNs etc.

~~~
imaginenore
"great pricing" it is not. None of the major cloud providers have great
pricing with the exception of some niche cases.

Look at Hetzner. Look at the cheap VPS options. Google/AWS don't come even
close.

~~~
boulos
Pricing of _compute_ on GCE is extremely competitive. The per-minute billing
(which Azure matched) really adds up for tons of workloads. Similarly, our
custom shapes means you don't end up paying for twice as many cores (16 => 32)
when you really want something in between.

Where I do agree is networking egress. The big three providers all have
metered bandwidth rates that are way above the "all inclusive" fee you pay to
Hetzner, OVH, DO, and others. The cheapest way to host an ftp server that
serves 20 TB per month is certainly on one of these (today). None of these
providers will let you serve 1 PB / month this way, but if you're in their
sweet spot and they can make it work out on average, it's a good fit.

But if you're looking to just have a simple "VPS" in the cloud, our f1-micro
is just over $4/month (the AWS t2 series is also super cheap). Again, you're
right if you're talking about networking egress, but not everybody needs to
serve multiple TB per month.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud, so I'm trying to take your money in
exchange for services.

~~~
jorangreef
"Pricing of compute on GCE is extremely competitive. The per-minute billing
(which Azure matched) really adds up for tons of workloads."

To the extent that a developer uses GCE for only part of a month? Or to the
extent that a developer uses GCE for 100% of a month? I would think that GCE
is not extremely competitive (relative to dedicated offerings) if used on a
24/7 basis.

------
user5994461
Google has all the exact same offerings as AWS.

The IaaS part is called GCE (Google Compute Engine):
[https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing](https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing)

Given all your comments in this thread. You seem to struggle quite a lot to
understand the market and you didn't clarify what you want to achieve (how
many servers do you have now? how many applications do you run? how many dev?
how big is your company?)

So forgive me for thinking you are either a hobbyist or a newcomer, with
rather simple needs. If that's the case, GCE and AWS are overkill. You should
stick to Digital Ocean or Linode. It's wayyy simpler and cheaper.

~~~
bbcbasic
Is using Digital Ocean and administering your own box simpler than using the
off the shelf DB/storage options provide db AWS?

Surely the AWS options save you doing all the DBA / Server admin / security
work. Albeit for more money but time = money.

~~~
tracker1
It would be interesting to see how well the AWS/Azure SaaS offerings for db
and other storage work from DO/Linode at various locations...

I've thought about running an app or two on DO, but keeping the data in Azure
Storage Tables, and possible Azure SQL... or similar AWS services.

~~~
boulos
You would pay a _lot_ for the egress ($.08/GB or so) and it'd be painfully far
away. MySQL ends up caching queries quite well for many web apps, so you
quickly get into sub-ms territory for it to just return the cached answer.
This all goes out the window, even if you're 5ms away (say DO in San Francisco
to AWS in Northern California).

tl;dr: Don't do it.

------
olavgg
There is a lot of votes here for cloud providers. And while I think AWS is
great, it is not great at everything.

What I've done recently is buying used servers and 10G/40g network switches
from Ebay and rented a colo(colocation) rack, which can be had from $500-$1000
per month per rack. This often includes 100mbit++ internet, power, cooling and
more
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colocation_centre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colocation_centre))

This has been the most cost effective way for me to deploy for example Hadoop,
Ceph, Elasticsearch, Huge Varnish cache solutions. While I understand this is
not for everyone, it is absolutely something to consider if you have a strong
devops team. I do all this myself as I've build my own automation tools over
the years that simplify setup and monitoring.

On the other hand, I use AWS for GPU instances as I find it very cost
effective because it is very easy to scale up and down by demand. And
investing in this kind of hardware is expensive/risky. The power efficiency /
performance is still following Moores law for each year for GPU's, and I
expect new hardware that is better optimized for neural networks / machine
learning is just around the corner.

~~~
boulos
If what you're after is 24x7 always on machines in a single DC, you're
absolutely right: both GCE and EC2 are charging you for a premium you're not
using (scale up and down, refresh your machines, handle power failures and
maintenance, geographic diversity).

That said, I think your first two examples (Hadoop and Ceph) are competively
priced on Google Cloud. With Dataproc, you can put all your HDFS data on GCS
and then run your cluster on Preemptible VMs. Combined with the ability to
spin up and down as you need it, that's actually hard to beat economically in
a colo setup.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

~~~
Veratyr
> I think your first two examples (Hadoop and Ceph) are competively priced on
> Google Cloud.

I think this depends on:

\- Whether Ceph is being used as block storage (RBD) or object storage
(regular Rados, RGW)

\- How much bandwidth is being egressed

I don't know much about block storage on the GCE but for object storage, it's
not hard to beat GCS pricing by buying a few second hand SC846 and filling
them with WD Red drives.

The biggest issue with Google's cloud services (and most others actually) for
me though is that network egress is _horrendously_ expensive compared to the
kind of deal you can get buying transit directly. Google's network is also one
of the best of the planet but not everyone wants or needs to pay for that.

At the highest volume pricing, GCP egress costs $0.08/GB. Even with CDN
interconnect pricing and free egress through CloudFlare, you're paying
$0.04/GB. Contrast this to a budget colo like Joe's Datacenter
(joesdatacenter.com) where you pay $75/mo for 100Mbps 95th percentile. That's
$75/mo for 32.4TB of egress ($0.002/GB), which would cost $1280 on GCP. At the
higher volumes, you can get 10Gbps from FDC Servers for $1k/mo. Saturating
that port would get you 3.24PB of traffic in a month, costing $0.0003/GB (a
hundredth of what you'd pay Google).

This means if you want to, for example, store your data on GCS and do your
compute elsewhere (or vice versa), you're paying far more for premium
bandwidth than you really need to.

It's a really annoying kind of lockin.

------
crypt1d
I work as a SysAdmin / DevOps and I tried many of the ones which were
mentioned so far. Here is my summary. I'll skip AWS as everyone is familiar
with it at this point.

Digitalocean - very friendly UI with lots of options to spin quickly virtual
machines, in many different regions. Some options for backups, etc, but not
much on top. They have an API that could allow you to setup orchestration
though, which is pretty cool. For a small to medium shop, it should be fine.

OVH - similar story as DO, except they have a bigger network and also offer a
wide range of dedicated servers. They seem to be more EU centric but also have
a Canadian DC. Their 'child' services kimsurfi and soyoustart offer very
affordable dedicated server options, targeted at people doing minor projects
and gaming rigs. They also run runabove.com, which is their 'lab' project -
here they used to offer power8 VMs, etc.

Hetzner - cheap dedicated servers in Europe. Recently added DDOS protection.
They have a 'marketplace' where u can bid on dedicated servers and thus avoid
initial setup costs.

Leaseweb - also pretty good, they have a range of products similar to OVH
(dedicated servers, VPS, cloud, etc).

Haven't used GCE yet unfortunately, but I heard good things about it. Seems to
be the only real direct contender to AWS at this point.

~~~
tluyben2
For just (at least these days) reliable metal I would second OVH. I have been
running servers there for 15 years, starting with support in French only. They
used to have issues but now they are, for me, best bang for my buck: storage,
cpu etc for spidering setups, experimenting, non critical heavy experiments
etc. I have many servers which went from that kind of status to full prod
because of convenience and they have not let me down through several major
version debian updates.

~~~
herbst
price is amazing but the support can suck hard. I had one of my servers down
for over 12 hours (even thought i noticed it instantly) because they claimed
the issue is on my site. After 12 hours, many telephonates and so more they
wrote a simple semi automated email that they found a broken cable and fixed
it... Still pissed to this day, but yeah the price for the power is amazing.

~~~
tluyben2
Yep; that's why basically, don't use it for prod. Unless the service does not
suffer from major down times. Which is more often than you think although
ofcourse sit owners stress when there is downtime.

------
jsingleton
Azure looks like the only major one you missed. I've used both AWS and Azure a
lot. The best one will obviously depend on your use case but if you avoid lock
in it shouldn't matter too much. I may write more on this if people are
interested.

AWS comparison: [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/campaigns/azure-vs-
aws/](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/campaigns/azure-vs-aws/)

They have more regions than AWS (30 vs 13):

[https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/regions/](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-
us/regions/)

[https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-
infrastructure/](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/)

The naming is a bit funny though:

[https://unop.uk/azure-eu-regions-naming-confusion/](https://unop.uk/azure-eu-
regions-naming-confusion/)

Someone here thought this was due to using UN regions.

~~~
pdelgallego
I would love to read more about AWS vs Azure, how services compare, and
strategies on how to avoid lock in.

Any recommendation?

~~~
jnsaff2
I have previously built a auto-scaling/healing Mesos cluster on AWS for a
retail company (scaling heavily during peak and sometimes during promotions)
and doing the same on Azure for a much bigger retail organisation at the
moment.

So this is my in the trenches comparison:

\- AWS documentation is excellent, Azure docs are weird and inconsistent and
for some bits nonexistent.

\- Azure API's are inconsistent and weird, but once you figure out they work
relatively well. But the lack of documentation compounds confusion.

\- Azure has a lot of very weird limitations that don't make any sense:

\-- Default Centos images are 30GB osDisk and you can't resize them, you have
to create your own images if you do want to.

\-- You can have SSD's in 128/512/1024GB sizes and you pay for them in full,
Spinning disks are billed per actual usage.

\-- You have to store your osDisk image in the same storage account as your
machine you are running (so you have to pay for your image the full SSD
monthly price)

\-- You have a VMSS (=Auto Scaling Group) and have a Load Balancer in front of
it, your microservice connections fail if the load balancer routes the
connection back to the same VM ... you now have to have another VMSS just for
load balancing/service discovery.

\- Their services labelled Beta are really more like Alpha quality.

\- On the plus side, their ARM templates are richer and nicer to use than
CloudFormation, however the lack of documentation for them kills all the
advantages.

\- When you jump all the hoops and get past the issues, the things work
relatively well.

~~~
zamalek
Agree completely, two additions:

Azure's interface is years ahead of AWS. Most importantly: there's a single
entry-point for everything. Just this month I was evaluating some stuff on
AWS. I was certain that I had cleared everything that I was using up - I
hadn't. Luckily it was merely a $17 lesson.

The nomenclature used is also quite understandable, unlike AWS which has
branded everything down to the NIC.

------
TheAceOfHearts
I think Google Cloud Platform looks solid. Their alternative to EC2 is Google
Compute Engine.

If you want stuff taken care of for you, Google App Engine is great. I'll note
that I haven't deployed anything to production, only played around with it for
fun. The flexible environment is still in beta, so it doesn't provide any
SLAs. For a large serious production project that's a big factor to consider.
If it's a small app, I think the "magic" is worth it. But I've only hacked
together toy node APIs for SPAs.

For data storage, Cloud Datastore looks great. If it seemed to fit my problem,
I'd probably go with that. The big problem with that is vendor lock-in. It has
an emulator for testing and development. If you had to migrate away from it, I
think AppScale [0] has an open source alternative, but I'm unable to vouch for
its quality. If I were creating a serious long-term project, a Postgres
instance on RDS would probably be my other choice. Google has Cloud SQL, but
my experience with MySQL hasn't been as pleasant as with Postgres. I don't
know how they compare "at scale".

In my job we use AWS in production, and I've slowly learned my way around it.
I'd say I'm still a total beginner with AWS. Although I've only used GCP "for
fun", from my limited experience and my perspective as an application
developer, it seems more easily approachable / accessible.

[0]
[https://github.com/AppScale/appscale](https://github.com/AppScale/appscale)

~~~
kkrs
It shouldn't be too hard to build an interface that abstracts away datastore
specific details.

------
jburwell
The following are a few alternatives off the top of my head:

    
    
       * Google Compute Engine
       * Microsoft Azure
       * Joyent
       * IBM BlueMix
       * Linode (like DigitalOcean more VPS than cloud provider)

~~~
bachback
Google is not as general as AWS and therefore has serious vendor lockin. Azure
only recently has decided to support docker and is not rooted in opensource.

The big downside of AWS: to difficult to use for many. It seems to me a new
entrant which combines easy of use, embraces opensource, would have a good
chance in the market.

\+ Rackspace. But like many these don't come from the cloud market and still
think in terms of servers mostly.

~~~
pacala
> Google is not as general as AWS and therefore has serious vendor lockin.

Presumably you are talking about Google App Engine, which is just a small part
of GCP. Amazon's comparable offering is Elastic Beanstalk. The core building
blocks on GCP and AWS are the same: raw virtual machines you can build
anything upon yourself, GCE vs EC2. GCE has been around since 2012.

------
brudgers
To me, the alternatives to AWS depend on the workload. For Netflix the
alternative is building a chain of massive data centers or negotiating with
Microsoft or negotiating with Google. For a Ruby on Rails app, Heroku is one.
For someone just monkeying around with Kubernetes, maybe a some Raspberry Pi.

The alternatives also are related to the specific business. For Home Depot,
running on AWS means running in a competitor's data center.

The problem of finding and alternative to AWS really boils down to research,
and that's a time commitment versus just whipping out the plastic. One might
say, "Nobody ever got fired for using AWS."

~~~
bdcravens
Heroku is on AWS. If that's an alternative, then there are others that
similarly run atop AWS, such as Cloud66.

~~~
brudgers
A good point. I suppose that what 'an alternative to AWS' is varies too.

By which I mean that Heroku is an alternative to AWS from the standpoint of
user interface and API's in the same way that Haskell is an alternative to C
even though both can ultimately place values in x64 CPU registers and cause
JMP's to locations in memory.

------
jpkeisala
I have been using Hetzner, I have few servers there. Linux and Windows. They
are very cheap if you look someone in Europe. I usually recommend Hetzner and
if there will be scaling problems we can always move to expensive places like
AWS and Azure.

I also have great experiences with Azure but not sure how it fits to startup
world. I am only working on Azure on enterprise (.NET) customers and for them
it is a nice service. Microsoft has Bizpark where you can get tons of Azure
power for next to nothing.
[https://bizspark.microsoft.com//plus/](https://bizspark.microsoft.com//plus/)

I have not worked on Google Cloud but as mentioned in comments I probably
should look into that.

------
ssalat
Good question! AWS is currently getting a mess for us.

We're facing an auto scaling spot instance bug (it's definitely one) and we're
trying since 3 days to contact anybody from them to get our business back on
to the road!

We're now forced to sign-up for a paid support plan. Nevertheless, they
already breached the SLA of 12 hours, it's really frustrating...

First thought after 5 years of paying them a lot of money to migrate somewhere
else (e.g. Google).

It's always ciritcal if you lose your customer contact by implementing strange
support barriers to earn 3$ more.

A not anymore happy AWS customer

~~~
boundlessdreamz
While I like GCE more than AWS, when it comes to support GCE is also paid-
only.

GCE plans are much easier to understand though. TIL AWS support plan cost
varies by how much you bill and higher the bill, higher the support cost!.
That doesn't make any sense.

~~~
ssalat
Yes, this is absolutely not transparent!

------
Feld0
OVH specializes in dedicated servers ([https://www.ovh.com/ca/en/dedicated-
servers/](https://www.ovh.com/ca/en/dedicated-servers/)) but they offer an API
for ordering them and can deliver many of them within a couple of minutes.
They have a number of "cloud"/managed offerings as well if you browse around
their site. They have datacentres in France and Canada, and are currently
bringing up new ones in the US, Australia, and Singapore that they hope to
launch by the end of the year. I've been a customer for >3 years now and have
been very pleased with their service and support.

OP mentioned a desire to work with bare metal/do IaaS their own way, and
dedicated server providers are awesome for that. Conversations about
infrastructure are often about "cloud vs. running our own datacentres!" and
renting dedicated servers is an interesting middle ground - you get _a ton_ of
hardware and bandwidth for your dollar and maintaining the hardware isn't your
problem. You give up per-hour billing but you could very well still save money
- it's a serious alternative to VPS providers like DigitalOcean.

~~~
candiodari
They also have their cheaper branch www.kimsufi.com, lower specs, still
dedicated.

And you still wouldn't believe the speed difference of a low atom with a VPS,
even if the VPS is running on a xeon. Goes double for tail latency.

~~~
jonatron
Also the uptime on my kimsufi is 530 days, you're unlikely to get that with a
VPS, or 'cloud instance'.

~~~
petercooper
I wondered about that as I have tons of VPSes - the highest was in the 300s.
My Hetzner server, though, 1389 days and counting!

------
hurricaneSlider
We use Azure. In some aspects they're playing catch up but if you're a startup
and can get into their bizspark program, there are a lot of benefits. They are
also making a significant effort to open their platform to Linux, Docker and
other cloud technologies beyond Windows.

~~~
blahi
>In some aspects they're playing catch up

And it some aspects, they are way ahead. Analytics is one of those examples.

~~~
UK-AL
I like their monitoring tools.

------
samblr
Google app engine with flexible environment is really cool.

Google-app-engine couple of years ago was claustrophobic with most of the
things baked inside its environment. As a developer I felt restricted and
there was the fear of locking in.

But with intro of flexible environment its really good for any web application
(except ones with real-time communication as sockets arent supported yet). So
for now way to work around this is - have a (GKE) kubernetes handle all real
time traffic and REST traffic to app-engine.

I havent used AWS so so cant comment on it - but there is another reason its
better to be on google compute engine - Google kind of leads in machine
learning and AI - so when they decide to role out goodies on server side - its
not a bad idea staying close to these.

edit: really food -> really good :)

~~~
rbanffy
AppScale makes a Google App Engine environment you can deploy on your own
infrastructure.

------
nik736
Depends on what exactly a cloud provider is for you. If it's only about VMs
with an API and global footprint there are several options:

\- GCE

\- SoftLayer (IBM IaaS)

\- Azure

And additionally there are several other providers that are more comparable to
DigitalOcean like Vultr, Linode, Scaleway, etc.

~~~
bachback
true. I'm looking for something where I can potentially build the whole IaaS
myself on baremetal at some point. Vultr looks great - thanks!

~~~
dastbe
For fun, or for profit? Building IaaS to support your own company is hard
enough; building it with the level of isolation and security required to be
multitenant is harder still.

------
tshtf
Google has far more than App Engine today; they basically compete with AWS
directly service by service.

~~~
mrep
I would love a direct service to service comparison between the major cloud
providers.

Anyone know of a guide like that?

~~~
tafda
Available service, SLA, and region comparison for AWS, Google, Azure and
Softlayer at a fairly high level:

[http://cloudcomparison.rightscale.com](http://cloudcomparison.rightscale.com)

~~~
jasode
I looked at that Rightscale link and I think it shows that comparing a very
fast moving area like cloud services is very difficult and results in
incomplete features matrix. For the unsophisticated buyer, this can lead to
misleading comparisons.

For example, Rightscale has "Event-Driven Compute" (sometimes aka as
"serverless computation") in the AWS column (AWS Lambda) but that entry is
blank in Google Cloud column. However in February 2016, Google announced
_Google Cloud Functions_ which is the equivalent to _AWS Lambda_.

I'd expect a cloud comparison website to update the features matrix within 1
week of the AWS re:invent conferences, the Google I/O conferences, and any
press releases.

As for the other comparison Cloudorado mentioned by another poster, that
comparison matrix is missing database services like mapreduce, business
intelligence analytics, etc.

~~~
kweins
Thanks for the feedback. We haven't included Google Cloud Functions yet in the
Cloud Comparison tool because it's still in Alpha. We update the information
in the Cloud Comparison site quarterly and allow each cloud provider the
opportunity to review the material and send us any corrections.

------
Jaepa
There are a couple options, but it kind of depends on what you want.

There is Openstack, which is a collections of IaaS provider with connected
with an API.

Digitial Ocean & Vultr which you already know about.

GCE mentioned else where here.

Linode, while not feature rich is the 2nd largest VPS provider.

Azure, which is Microsoft's IaaS. Which I've always had some reservations
about, but have actually subcontracted management out separate companies to
protect user info.

Scalaway is great low price option but there AZ's are mostly in Europe.

I'm personally using LunaNode, which doesn't offer nearly as many nine's in up
time, but is great for the price (I have a 3 cpu, with 2G of ram, for ~$10 a
month).

There are tonnes of IaaS platforms out there, very few have the full feature
set of EC2, but again it depends on what you want.

~~~
bArray
Just signed up to Scalaway. Being in France is pretty neat as it's close to
the UK so I understand their law. Currently running an AWS nano instance but I
think I'm paying too much for it. Unfortunately it seems as though they are
out of the C1 instances.

Thanks for the heads up!

~~~
quuuux
On the lower end of their server types I can recommend their VC1 instances as
an alterantive. In my experience they offer noticeably better performance with
regards to both CPU and IO than the dedicated C1 boxes.

------
thom
One easy alternative to AWS is just shovelling your cash directly onto a
bonfire.

However, if you care about the actual server bit, Rackspace have their
'hybrid' cloud offers. There's a small but well-thought-of company in the UK
called Bytemark who have a cloud offering but I doubt it qualifies as having a
global footprint.

~~~
meritt
AWS is just meeting the needs of the startup community, like the monthly box
subscription website who believes they have the same engineering problems as
Netflix.

~~~
ranman
Netflix... which also runs on AWS. Or was that the joke?
[https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-
studies/](https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/)

------
sidcool
I have used Google Compute Engine, and we're quite happy. The I/O especially
is quite good.

------
apapli
There's a little company called Microsoft. Word on the street is they are
averaging one new data centre a week now. Although a bit behind AWS they are
exceptional at copying market leaders and are getting some good traction with
folks like Adobe. </end sarcasm>

Seriously, worth a look if you need a solid alternative to AWS.

~~~
bikamonki
You meant </sarcasm>

~~~
apapli
Too true :)

------
kayman
Digital Ocean is the most popular. But as others have mentioned, there is also
Vultr. Vultr has locations in Sydney which was a big plus for me.

I personally can vouch for Vultr. Been running a freebsd system with them for
over a year now.

When clients ask about AWS, I throw in Digital Ocean or Vultr so they can save
a ton of money. Most of the the time, they go with AWS as it is the most
popular but tends to be an overkill for most of the projects I'm dealing with.

------
obulpathi
Google Cloud is not an alternative, but a much better option. If you have
pains with AWS or want a better version of Cloud (ease of use, performance,
scalability), give Google Cloud a try.

------
Rauchg
If you want to focus on the code and not the servers, give a try to
[https://zeit.co/now](https://zeit.co/now)

Disclosure: co-founder and CEO

~~~
mars4rp
MDG is expanding to the whole node.js ecosystem. You should become established
before Galaxy enters your market !!!

------
meddlepal
Google Cloud Platform and Azure. I have a lot of experience with GCP (mostly
Compute Engine) and really really like it.

------
dogma1138
When you say "AWS" what do you mean? there are tons of services under the AWS
umbrella; to which specific ones are you looking for alternatives?

If it's just "VPS" then there are plenty of providers, some even offer a
compatibility with the AWS API (IIRC even Rackspace does that these days).

If you are looking for an AWS specific service/platform e.g. Elasticsearch
then you need to be specific.

Overall AWS has a pretty extensive platform which is hard to beat, it's "META
API" which governs security, users, deployments etc. is also one of it's key
advantages.

------
api
Personally I am partial to heterogeneous deployments across commodity vendors
like Digital Ocean, Vultr, Linode, OVH, etc. You do have to think a little bit
more about security and devops but you get a lot of power and robustness for a
lot less money.

We do use S3 for backups and big storage. That has no equal.

~~~
devonkim
Every time I do the math the bandwidth egress costs of AWS and GCE become
rather large and non-trivial. How do you make it work for your workloads?

~~~
api
We don't use AWS or GCE. The other providers don't charge anywhere close to as
much for bandwidth... to the point that deploying _across multiple providers_
and using the Internet as our backplane network is no issue.

One trick I like is to split infrastructure across 2-3 different providers at
at least three different _nearby_ data centers. Example: Chicago (Vultr),
Toronto (DO), Montreal (OVH). Latency is low enough for most replication
purposes and if one experiences a massive failure the other two will be fine.
3/3 failure probably requires alien invasion or global thermonuclear war.

------
ajb
Anyone tried Alibaba's cloud:
[https://intl.aliyun.com/](https://intl.aliyun.com/) ?

------
mlacks
I've learned to really appreciate what Joyent brings to the table, as far as
philosophy, but I haven't had the chance to really test it out for myself.

------
ngrilly
In my opinion, Google Compute Engine is a great alternative to AWS, better in
most aspects. For something simpler, if you're looking for an alternative to
Digital Ocean and are in Europe, excoscale.ch is interesting.

------
St-Clock
If you are located in North America, I would suggest looking at Storm On
Demand [1] (the unmanaged offering of LiquidWeb).

They offer more bare services than AWS but they provide:

\- Virtual Machines with many configurations available (on shared host or
dedicated host)

\- Private Cloud

\- Private LAN with close to sub-millisecond latency

\- Automated backup, snapshots

\- API

\- Load Balancer

\- CDN (backed by Akamai)

\- Block Storage (but I found it too slow for our needs)

\- Different levels of managed hosting

LiquidWeb has even more options, but you usually need to pay for managed
hosting (they throw in tons of free bandwidth though).

Support is really good: of course you sometimes end up speaking with someone
who is clueless or overworked, but it is extremely rare and most support
people are knowledgeable, helpful, and quick. We migrated a legacy VM with old
cpanel and drupal sites and even though Drupal is not in their main expertise,
they optimized the heck out of the configs and the sites are running twice as
fast as before on weaker hardware.

Uptime is excellent: as opposed to Google or Amazon, they do everything in
their power to keep the physical host and the VMs up and connected. In other
words, they have a single host SLA (Amazon and Google's SLA only applies for
multi-AZ outages if I remember correctly). They also built their own
datacenters and are not collocating or renting someone else's datacenter.

Performance of their SSD VMs is better than Linode's and DO's VMs in our
internal benchmarks.

If you need more than a few VMs, contacting Sales is a really good idea
because they can make you some interesting offers.

The main downside for us is that they are located in central US so latency is
not ideal for our eastern Canada customer base.

FWIW, we moved all our VMs from Linode to Storm because we lost confidence in
Linode (DDOS, security, lack of transparency) even though the ratio
performance/cost/reliability (in Newark, before the DDOS incident) was
impossible to beat.

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

------
lwhalen
Profitbricks, Rackspace, hosting it yourself on an Openstack cluster, etc.
There are really a glut of 'cloud providers' out there, you just have to do
the footwork of defining your needs and then finding one that meets most of
them. Alternatively you could hire a consultant (hi!) to assist you, if you'd
prefer to stay focused on the business side of things.

------
smtt
Depends on your exact needs and such but I really like Heroku, it doesn't have
as much as AWS or GCE but it has some nice benefits like good
monitoring/stats, very cool pipelines system and super easy scaling

------
em3rgent0rdr
open source alternatives to AWS (you can self-host):

[https://www.rackspace.com/openstack](https://www.rackspace.com/openstack)
[http://cloudstack.apache.org](http://cloudstack.apache.org)
[http://www8.hp.com/us/en/cloud/helion-eucalyptus-
overview.ht...](http://www8.hp.com/us/en/cloud/helion-eucalyptus-
overview.html) [http://opennebula.org](http://opennebula.org)

------
rpcope1
If you're looking for low end, lowendbox.com is a great resource. In
particular I've had pretty good luck with both
HostUS([https://hostus.us/](https://hostus.us/)) and Joe's Datacenter in
Kansas City ([http://joesdatacenter.com/](http://joesdatacenter.com/)). OVH
and Hetzner are also big players in this sphere, if you're looking for a
VPS/dedi in particular.

~~~
hacym
HostUS has been great for me. But Joe's stores account passwords in plain
text. Don't use em.

------
dhirajbajaj
It depends what your app stack requirement is.

Google appengine is PAAS based, has competitive features and low priced than
AWS EBS comparative. Google compute service is IAAS based and EC2 comparative.

I found, transition from AWS to GAE is usually not that easy and quick at
least for a simple rails app deployment using Postgres.

Appengine has still less developers community which is why learning curve is
high and you need to dig and troubleshoot more than AWS which is abundant with
tutorials, gems, plugins etc.

------
orsenthil
DC/OS from Mesosphere is a an alternative to AWS that you should consider
looking into. (Ref:
[https://mesosphere.com/product/](https://mesosphere.com/product/)) That will
reduce your reliance on Amazon to just hardware, that's what are you paying
for. In addition, you can use Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, your datacenter
alongside as a single homogenous cluster.

------
nivertech
I gathered a lot of bookmarks for major IaaS clouds comparison on twitter:

[https://twitter.com/nivertech/status/679058892052168705](https://twitter.com/nivertech/status/679058892052168705)

[https://twitter.com/nivertech/status/782892922580664320](https://twitter.com/nivertech/status/782892922580664320)

------
tf2manu994
Maybe not what you wanted but hetzner?

Crazy cheap. Support is garbage.

~~~
bachback
thanks, but I don't think hetzner is cloud based. most hosters still speak
about servers as physical machines as in 2005.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Because servers are physical machines. Virtual machines, instances, etc are
not servers per se. Servers traditionally == physical node.

Source: 15 years in ops

------
smilliken
Check out NephoScale. I'm a happy customer for years. They have cloud and
dedicated machines, so you're not forced to choose. Their machines have high
performance hardware, which saves you enormous amounts of time not having to
deal with unreliable networks, weak virtualized CPUs, low IOPS disks...

------
omginternets
On a related note, is there a SaaS platform for access to cheap (~ $.001 +/\-
$.002 per Gb) disk space?

~~~
ekiara
You could tie your cheap or free Openshift/Heroku to multiple free BackBlaze
B2 storage accounts.

Depending on how 'grey' you're willing to behave you can get away with doing a
lot on a virtually free infrastructure.

~~~
omginternets
Could you please elaborate? What is involved in doing this?

------
NetStrikeForce
I'm not sure you're looking for an AWS alternative if you think DigitalOcean
is one.

Right now only Azure (behind) and Google Cloud (way behind) are alternatives
to AWS.

If what you need is just VMs and a CRUD API, then yes, DO is a very good
alternative (I run most of my servers with them).

~~~
notwedtm
What about GCE makes you feel they are further behind AWS than Azure? Azure
has more regions, but my experience is that GCE is quickly catching up in
features and services in comparison to AWS.

~~~
NetStrikeForce
That's the impression I get from following these series of comparisons
(unfinished! I guess there's a chance my opinion might change at the end of
it): [https://blogs.endjin.com/2016/07/aws-vs-azure-vs-google-
clou...](https://blogs.endjin.com/2016/07/aws-vs-azure-vs-google-cloud-
platform/)

I also e.g. have the impression that the most comprehensive/complete/ready to
use container solution seems to be GKE, so on some specific areas there would
be different "winners". In overall terms I got the feeling Google has a
simpler offering than AWS and Azure.

------
caghan
If you're looking for something new, you should try Live Vertical Resize at
skyAtlas. [http://www.skyatlas.com/why-skyatlas/](http://www.skyatlas.com/why-
skyatlas/)

------
cjbprime
Azure, Google Cloud, Rackspace.

------
bArray
Somebody recently informed me of Profit Server:
[https://profitserver.ru/en/](https://profitserver.ru/en/)

The benefits are that the service is extremely cheap.

------
qwertyuiop924
Joyent, Google, and MS are the alternatives that usually come up. I haven't
used any of them myself, and I've heard good and bad things about all of them.

That probably wasn't very helpful.

------
codingdave
What are you trying to achieve? There are a plethora of choices and services
out there, but without knowing what you want to do, all we can do is give you
a list of company names.

------
pyritschard
Exoscale sits in the middle between AWS and Digital Ocean. It has a much
narrower catalog than that of AWS but essential services needed to drive cloud
application.

------
herbst
pretty much any trendy smaller cloud provider comes with a API today. Think
digital ocean or my favorite exoscale. Most of them are by far cheaper than
the big 3.

------
koolhead17
[https://minio.io](https://minio.io) \- Open source alternative to AWS-S3,
written in go.

~~~
buraksarica
The word "Alternative" may create little bit over-expectation on this product.

------
jmknyc06
You should check out Hyper.sh! Very simple Docker hosting cloud with per
second pricing and great documentation and support.

------
stephengillie
My employer operates 18 data centers in 7 countries around the world. We offer
a competitive array of services and features, dynamic networking
configuration, numerous ecosystem partners, API access to all of this, and
high-quality support. [https://www.ctl.io/](https://www.ctl.io/)

~~~
NetStrikeForce
I'm not sure why you've been downvoted, so I gave you my upvote because your
comment is relevant.

I've clicked on the link and your employer is CenturyLink, which is not a
bunch of friends with a rack in a garage.

------
recmend
Google Cloud, Azure, IBM Softlayer, RackSpace, Digital Ocean, Linode.

------
my123
Azure with Ressource Manager instead of Classic.

------
youdontknowtho
Seriously...haven't looked at Azure?

------
nwrk
Oracle

------
elcct
I am using a few dedicated servers and Rancher (container platform). This way
it is magnitudes cheaper than AWS and probably as easy to use. You can also
avoid "cloud lock-in" when you start like this.

~~~
ekiara
Do they have any sort of pricing page? It seems to be buried down in their
site somewhere, I can't find anything.

~~~
elcct
As far as I know Rancher is free and open source

------
twelvenmonkeys
If you'd like to try something simple, use us:
[https://datamantle.com](https://datamantle.com) just a simple VPS provider.

------
setheron
We just announced our bare metal cloud service at Oracle.

It's still new but pretty cool team and underlying tech.

~~~
Jonnax
I did a quick search of the site and couldn't find any information on pricing.

Is it one of those things where if you have to ask, it's too expensive for
you?

