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Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

by bachback on 10/2/16, 10:20 AM with 207 comments

AWS has captured an enormous market. As a user I'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.

  • by vayarajesh on 10/3/16, 8:21 AM

    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.

  • by user5994461 on 10/2/16, 6:57 PM

    Google has all the exact same offerings as AWS.

    The IaaS part is called GCE (Google Compute Engine): 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.

  • by olavgg on 10/3/16, 10:17 AM

    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)

    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.

  • by crypt1d on 10/3/16, 8:28 AM

    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.

  • by jsingleton on 10/3/16, 9:15 AM

    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/

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

    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/regions/

    https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/

    The naming is a bit funny though:

    https://unop.uk/azure-eu-regions-naming-confusion/

    Someone here thought this was due to using UN regions.

  • by TheAceOfHearts on 10/3/16, 9:11 AM

    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

  • by jburwell on 10/2/16, 11:01 AM

    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)

  • by brudgers on 10/2/16, 3:35 PM

    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."

  • by jpkeisala on 10/3/16, 9:49 AM

    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/

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

  • by ssalat on 10/3/16, 8:40 AM

    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

  • by Feld0 on 10/3/16, 1:14 AM

    OVH specializes in 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.

  • by hurricaneSlider on 10/2/16, 11:54 AM

    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.

  • by samblr on 10/3/16, 11:00 AM

    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 :)

  • by nik736 on 10/2/16, 4:29 PM

    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.

  • by tshtf on 10/2/16, 12:14 PM

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

  • by Jaepa on 10/3/16, 12:59 AM

    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.

  • by thom on 10/3/16, 7:54 AM

    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.

  • by apapli on 10/3/16, 8:54 AM

    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.

  • by sidcool on 10/2/16, 1:59 PM

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

  • by kayman on 10/3/16, 1:13 AM

    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.

  • by obulpathi on 10/3/16, 12:31 AM

    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.

  • by Rauchg on 10/3/16, 1:39 AM

    If you want to focus on the code and not the servers, give a try to https://zeit.co/now

    Disclosure: co-founder and CEO

  • by meddlepal on 10/3/16, 2:42 AM

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

  • by dogma1138 on 10/3/16, 12:32 PM

    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.

  • by api on 10/3/16, 3:47 AM

    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.

  • by ajb on 10/3/16, 8:05 AM

    Anyone tried Alibaba's cloud: https://intl.aliyun.com/ ?

  • by mlacks on 10/3/16, 1:42 AM

    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.

  • by ngrilly on 10/3/16, 12:45 PM

    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.

  • by St-Clock on 10/3/16, 9:04 AM

    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/

  • by lwhalen on 10/3/16, 1:56 AM

    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.

  • by smtt on 10/3/16, 2:00 AM

    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

  • by em3rgent0rdr on 10/3/16, 1:41 AM

  • by rpcope1 on 10/4/16, 12:05 AM

    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/) and Joe's Datacenter in Kansas City (http://joesdatacenter.com/). OVH and Hetzner are also big players in this sphere, if you're looking for a VPS/dedi in particular.

  • by dhirajbajaj on 10/6/16, 9:55 AM

    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.

  • by orsenthil on 10/3/16, 9:25 AM

    DC/OS from Mesosphere is a an alternative to AWS that you should consider looking into. (Ref: 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.

  • by nivertech on 10/3/16, 11:13 AM

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

    https://twitter.com/nivertech/status/679058892052168705

    https://twitter.com/nivertech/status/782892922580664320

  • by tf2manu994 on 10/2/16, 11:11 AM

    Maybe not what you wanted but hetzner?

    Crazy cheap. Support is garbage.

  • by stephengillie on 10/3/16, 11:49 AM

    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/

  • by smilliken on 10/4/16, 7:32 AM

    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...

  • by omginternets on 10/3/16, 9:50 AM

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

  • by NetStrikeForce on 10/2/16, 8:00 PM

    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).

  • by caghan on 10/3/16, 1:43 AM

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

  • by cjbprime on 10/3/16, 12:55 AM

    Azure, Google Cloud, Rackspace.

  • by bArray on 10/4/16, 1:30 PM

    Somebody recently informed me of Profit Server: https://profitserver.ru/en/

    The benefits are that the service is extremely cheap.

  • by qwertyuiop924 on 10/3/16, 2:39 PM

    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.

  • by codingdave on 10/3/16, 1:20 AM

    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.

  • by pyritschard on 10/3/16, 8:23 AM

    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.

  • by herbst on 10/3/16, 6:43 PM

    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.

  • by koolhead17 on 10/3/16, 10:34 AM

    https://minio.io - Open source alternative to AWS-S3, written in go.

  • by jmknyc06 on 10/3/16, 3:32 PM

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

  • by recmend on 10/5/16, 1:51 AM

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

  • by my123 on 10/3/16, 2:34 PM

    Azure with Ressource Manager instead of Classic.

  • by youdontknowtho on 10/3/16, 11:09 AM

    Seriously...haven't looked at Azure?

  • by nwrk on 10/2/16, 7:53 PM

    Oracle

  • by elcct on 10/3/16, 9:08 AM

    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.

  • by twelvenmonkeys on 10/2/16, 4:58 PM

    If you'd like to try something simple, use us: https://datamantle.com just a simple VPS provider.

  • by setheron on 10/3/16, 8:10 AM

    We just announced our bare metal cloud service at Oracle.

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