I work for a consultancy company that helps other companies set up cloud infrastructure and secure it. We have a lot of customers on a lot of different platforms, from all-in on AWS, Azure and GCP to smaller local cloud providers, and it's interesting to see the market evolve.
It's true that using some of the smaller cloud providers can save you about half, but you might need an experienced engineer to come up with solutions and an extra machine here and there to ensure availability, so the one-on-one cost is not that clear-cut. Lots of smaller companies go all in on e.g. AWS, but then their eggs are locked into one expensive basket, especially if you build your product on AWS-specific services that can't be moved easily elsewhere.
The OVH control panel is probably the worst I've experienced out of all clouds. Random failures (resources not showing up), crashes, white pages, things not working or a lack of features that are considered "basic". It's also extremely slow.
I'd say at least 25% of my requests on it fail.
I recently had a cloud database completely freeze and lock up (including the replicas), no restart function is provided, so had to make a ticket to get it restarted.
Stay away.
Our biggest concern is a reliable replacement for RDS-postgres, which we've been using for about 13 years now and has been rock solid with the exception of a single, short period. Even then it was an update that caused high baseline CPU usage and AWS had it fixed in a few days.
Cost isn't the primary concern - though lower costs would be a nice side effect.
Shopping list:
- Good OpenTofu (or Terraform) support
- Reliable
- Good managed database (we could roll our own here if needed, I just don't wanna).
- Canadian DC
Nothing we do requires high performance or anything vendor specific. We also roll our own o11y and don't use AWS's vendor-specific solutions (at least not primarily).
https://www.fullhost.com/cloud-paas/
I'm intrigued but I'm also a little skeptical. They seem to do too much.
I hadn't heard of FullHost, and I agree, something seems off with their offerings. The site is so noisy. This really stood out to me in their "DevOps Paas" database section: "An Innovative Approach to Clustered Databases".
Like, I totally understand marketing is marketing, but I don't want an innovative approach to foundational technologies. These are things that we know how to work and operate well. Now maybe I'm not their target market, but I want a careful, thoughtful approach.
Also, while I'm sure there are incredibly talented, smart people working at these more local hosting / cloud companies, please, please don't try to innovate with bread and butter services... just make it work, day in, day out. That's what I want. It's why we're still on AWS.
Anyway, I sent FullHost sales a little note with some questions. Will report back.
They tried to suggest their in house Click-Ops layer (they compared it to Cloudformation) was adequate - which is a bit suspect.
They did offer some significant amount of access for exploration for a flat rate of $100. I might just poke around though I really don’t want to spend my time writing an OpenTofu provider.
That said, part of the desire to get off AWS is finding slightly less nefarious set of characters to hand money to and Ellison (and his lot) doesn’t fit the bill.
My only complaint is that one day, they had an electrical problem on their datacenter and we were down for an entire day. We lost dozens of clients that day.
But this was 6 years ago, so a lot must have changed since then. And yes, I know we should have had a plan for when such things happen, but we didn't have one. Nowadays we have a different architecture with more than one cloud provider for redundancy, and it's cheaper than having everything on AWS.
But they are the next economic recession waiting for Europe. It's my understanding that there is no legal basis any longer to transfer personally identifiable data to AWS servers. With the cooling of relations between USA and Europe, and the budding trade war, it's just a matter of time before cloud services become the next weapon. And huge European enterprises depend on American cloud businesses in hyper-critical ways.
Disclaimer: i work for Hopsworks
Just ensure that you have backup plans for your backup. OVH had a fire (shit happens), but then actually lost data. I don't think that has ever happened at AWS.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ovhcloud-ordered-...
Look what happens to one of OVHs datacenters, with wood ceilings and floors … completely destroyed some companies because their backups were also there.
When you search for it, you will see how negligently they managed this datacenter.
Maybe their professional offerings are better. Never made me want to try though...
So this has nothing to do with USA regime having access to data stored with USA companies. It’s just cost.
I recently discovered that Scaleway is also European, and that their offering is on par with many managed services AWS provides which could be a good drop-in replacement for them.
Public vs private companies are day vs night when it comes to transparency.
This is how their market power was built - with FUD, lies and tricks. Theyve now gotten to the point where theyre comfortable enough with this market power that they can lean on it while pursuing a strategy of developer wage compression.
But sure, if you're just renting ec2 resources and rearchitecturing is not feasible, AWS is probably a bad idea.
(I'm concerned they don't allow me to export the full server backups, but I backup the things I care about privately.)
I'd also like to hear more detail (budget, time, people and skills) on real cases.
When I had research students I set a few of them doing studies on migration, degoogling, data "repatriation" (ick!) and all the things I think we now call "sovereignty". But there was lots of theory and precious few solid, documented studies. There were also hundreds of propaganda pieces and Google/Microsoft/Amazon shill pieces sowing disinfo.
Surely that's changed now and the economic realities are clearer?
k8s:
> Good stability.
S3:
> AWS S3 is the premier cloud-based object storage service. It may have higher availability, but it’s three times more expensive than OVH’s S3 storage.
Eventually as the demand grows we will of course deploy in EU region to improve the availability.
If it is more of a sovereign aspect; we are deployable on kubernetes;one can already use our installer on OVHCloud and deploy on a European region.
My thinking on this has shifted a bit, I'm now just thinking I'll set up on Digital Ocean's Toronto data centre. I believe (assume is the right word, I guess) that they have a Canadian subsidiary (I found this: https://www.dnb.com/business-directory/company-profiles.digi...), and if Trump did issue an executive order cutting off Canadian access to American technology, I would hope this would be enough isolation to at least give me enough time to migrate elsewhere without customer impact. Who knows.
Although I still haven't ruled out giving OVH a try.
My email address is in my profile, happy to keep in touch if you turn up other options!
(I work there.)
Scaleway costs approximately 51 % less, looking at on-demand postgresql instance with 8 GB RAM (db.t3.large vs. db-dev-l).
https://aws.amazon.com/rds/postgresql/pricing/?pg=pr&loc=3
https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/managed-databases/#cost-...
The blue/green deploys, auto snapshotting, failover, upgrades, few-click resizing, etc justify the price vs running database servers (for me). I spend a lot of time looking for money in aws and never consider replacing RDS with anything else.