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What are some alternatives to AWS? Are there realistic alternatives?

jasode 11y ago
The "alternatives" depend on your situation. Picture a continuum between brain-dead simple websites and business-critical complex websites: simple: static website, WordPress blog moderate: small business CMS, etc complex: Netflix, AirBNB If you're running a simple WordPress blog, the AWS prices are absurdly overkill. For this use-case, there are a zillion alternatives. Linode, Digital Ocean, Rackspace bare metal, etc, etc. On the other end of the spectrum, you want to run a high-availability website with failover across multiple regions like Netflix. You need the value-added "services" of a comprehensive cloud provider (the "I" and "S" in "IaaS" as in "Infrastructure Services"). For that scenario, there are currently 4 big competitors: AWS, MS Azure, Google Compute Cloud, and IBM SoftLayer. However, many observers see that Google and IBM are not keeping pace with AWS and Azure on features so at the moment, it's more of a 2 horse race than a 4. Keep in mind that the vast majority of cost comparisons showing AWS to be overpriced are based on comparing Amazon's EC2 vs bare metal. The EC2 component is a small part of the complete AWS portfolio.[1] If you're doing more complicated websites, you have to include the costs of Linux admins + devops programmers to reinvent what AWS has out of the box. (The non-EC2 services.) Even if you use OpenStack as a baseline for a "homegrown AWS", you'll still need extensive staffing to configure and customize it for your needs. It may very well turn out that homegrown on Linode is cheaper but most articles on the web do not have quality cost analysis on the more complicated business scenarios. Anecdotes yes! But comprehensive unbiased spreadsheets with realistic cost comparisons?!? No. [1]https://aws.amazon.com/products/ https://aws.amazon.com/products/
- obulpathi 11y ago
  If you look at the speed at which Google Cloud has been adding products for past 6 months, you will be amazed. Google Cloud is now feature complete with AWS and 90% of its products are far better than AWS.
  - Jhsto 11y ago
    I've found Google Compute Engine decent, but with App Engine I ran into difficulties with vendor lock-in. I had to first modify my code to get the app run on my local computer. After that I never got it deployed because GAE requires me to bind their own TCP context for outbound connections. This was a shame because I would have wanted to have my app on GAE and database on Heroku. Just saying that calling 90% of Google Cloud's products to be far better than AWS (or any equivalent provider for that matter) is bold.
    - obulpathi 11y ago
      Google Cloud is not just App Engine now. Its pretty much the equivalent to aws in features. Let me also say I have PhD in Cloud and big data (graduated in 2013), worked for Amazon aws, worked for an rackspace for year and half, I was a core contributor to OpenStqck for the products OpenStack Poppy and OpenStack Zaqar. I hope you his puts se more weight behind my statements. If you are interested to know the details and why Google Cloud is better that aws for 90% of products, reach out to me.
      - subway 11y ago
        Cool story, bro.
      - a-lex 11y ago
        no.
      - nnain 11y ago
        stud!
      - matlock 11y ago
        They aren't even close to each other in featuers. All the various additional Services AWS supports go way beyond what Google has at the moment. Numerous Database offerings, Queueing, transcoder, ... Go way beyond what Google has in place. And no the ability to run it yourself on Google is not the same.
- randomflavor 11y ago
  Digitalocean is a great alternative for simple things. I use it for dev / early projects and as things get complex or need more redundancy I make the production spend on AWS.
obulpathi 11y ago
Please take a look into Google Cloud. It's now feature equivalent with AWS (https://cloud.google.com/docs/google-cloud-platform-for-aws-professionals https://cloud.google.com/docs/google-cloud-platform-for-aws-...). Google Cloud is better than AWS on all fronts other than Relational Databases. Google Cloud has MySQL only. AWS has MySQL, PostreSQL, Oracle, MSSQl. Rest of the services Google beats AWS by a fair and wide margin. I have done a fair amount of benchmarking Google vs AWS in past 3 months and conclusions are shocking. With Google Cloud, you can save about 50% of your bill (I have taken into account of reserved instances), huge increase in companies agility (Speed in taking decisions like capacity planning, instance type, sizing, zones, cluster sizes ... due to simplified infrastructure and pricing & performance wise too, blazing fast disks, live vm migration), far better security (data encryption at rest and on wire by default for all products, ssh key management). I am presenting my findings at our meetup group (http://www.meetup.com/Cloud-Big-Data-and-Data-Science-Group-of-Saint-Louis/ http://www.meetup.com/Cloud-Big-Data-and-Data-Science-Group-...) in a couple of months. If any of you want to talk, reach out to me at obulpathi at gmail.
- furfish 11y ago
  You'll need a better source than a Google marketing page to support claims of "feature parity". An objective comparison also shouldn't start with "Please look into Google cloud".
  - obulpathi 11y ago
    That is why I am sharing my findings in detail at out local meetup. If interested to know more, just shoot an email to me at Obulpathi at gmail. Also see my another comment above.
- larrymcp 11y ago
  Thanks; I hadn't seen that that page from Google and that's a pretty good idea to make that available. You know what would be a cool idea: if Google developed a method of copying an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to Google Cloud. That would give us an easy way to try out our same servers at Google without having to rebuild everything, as we do not use containers yet.

The "alternatives" depend on your situation. Picture a continuum between brain-dead simple websites and business-critical complex websites: simple: static website, WordPress blog moderate: small business CMS, etc complex: Netflix, AirBNB If you're running a simple WordPress blog, the AWS prices are absurdly overkill. For this use-case, there are a zillion alternatives. Linode, Digital Ocean, Rackspace bare metal, etc, etc. On the other end of the spectrum, you want to run a high-availability website with failover across multiple regions like Netflix. You need the value-added "services" of a comprehensive cloud provider (the "I" and "S" in "IaaS" as in "Infrastructure Services"). For that scenario, there are currently 4 big competitors: AWS, MS Azure, Google Compute Cloud, and IBM SoftLayer. However, many observers see that Google and IBM are not keeping pace with AWS and Azure on features so at the moment, it's more of a 2 horse race than a 4. Keep in mind that the vast majority of cost comparisons showing AWS to be overpriced are based on comparing Amazon's EC2 vs bare metal. The EC2 component is a small part of the complete AWS portfolio.[1] If you're doing more complicated websites, you have to include the costs of Linux admins + devops programmers to reinvent what AWS has out of the box. (The non-EC2 services.) Even if you use OpenStack as a baseline for a "homegrown AWS", you'll still need extensive staffing to configure and customize it for your needs. It may very well turn out that homegrown on Linode is cheaper but most articles on the web do not have quality cost analysis on the more complicated business scenarios. Anecdotes yes! But comprehensive unbiased spreadsheets with realistic cost comparisons?!? No. [1]https://aws.amazon.com/products/ https://aws.amazon.com/products/

obulpathi 11y ago
If you look at the speed at which Google Cloud has been adding products for past 6 months, you will be amazed. Google Cloud is now feature complete with AWS and 90% of its products are far better than AWS.
- Jhsto 11y ago
  I've found Google Compute Engine decent, but with App Engine I ran into difficulties with vendor lock-in. I had to first modify my code to get the app run on my local computer. After that I never got it deployed because GAE requires me to bind their own TCP context for outbound connections. This was a shame because I would have wanted to have my app on GAE and database on Heroku. Just saying that calling 90% of Google Cloud's products to be far better than AWS (or any equivalent provider for that matter) is bold.
  - obulpathi 11y ago
    Google Cloud is not just App Engine now. Its pretty much the equivalent to aws in features. Let me also say I have PhD in Cloud and big data (graduated in 2013), worked for Amazon aws, worked for an rackspace for year and half, I was a core contributor to OpenStqck for the products OpenStack Poppy and OpenStack Zaqar. I hope you his puts se more weight behind my statements. If you are interested to know the details and why Google Cloud is better that aws for 90% of products, reach out to me.
    - subway 11y ago
      Cool story, bro.
    - a-lex 11y ago
      no.
    - nnain 11y ago
      stud!
    - matlock 11y ago
      They aren't even close to each other in featuers. All the various additional Services AWS supports go way beyond what Google has at the moment. Numerous Database offerings, Queueing, transcoder, ... Go way beyond what Google has in place. And no the ability to run it yourself on Google is not the same.
randomflavor 11y ago
Digitalocean is a great alternative for simple things. I use it for dev / early projects and as things get complex or need more redundancy I make the production spend on AWS.

obulpathi 11y ago

Please take a look into Google Cloud. It's now feature equivalent with AWS (https://cloud.google.com/docs/google-cloud-platform-for-aws-professionals https://cloud.google.com/docs/google-cloud-platform-for-aws-...). Google Cloud is better than AWS on all fronts other than Relational Databases. Google Cloud has MySQL only. AWS has MySQL, PostreSQL, Oracle, MSSQl. Rest of the services Google beats AWS by a fair and wide margin. I have done a fair amount of benchmarking Google vs AWS in past 3 months and conclusions are shocking. With Google Cloud, you can save about 50% of your bill (I have taken into account of reserved instances), huge increase in companies agility (Speed in taking decisions like capacity planning, instance type, sizing, zones, cluster sizes ... due to simplified infrastructure and pricing & performance wise too, blazing fast disks, live vm migration), far better security (data encryption at rest and on wire by default for all products, ssh key management). I am presenting my findings at our meetup group (http://www.meetup.com/Cloud-Big-Data-and-Data-Science-Group-of-Saint-Louis/ http://www.meetup.com/Cloud-Big-Data-and-Data-Science-Group-...) in a couple of months. If any of you want to talk, reach out to me at obulpathi at gmail.

furfish 11y ago
You'll need a better source than a Google marketing page to support claims of "feature parity". An objective comparison also shouldn't start with "Please look into Google cloud".
- obulpathi 11y ago
  That is why I am sharing my findings in detail at out local meetup. If interested to know more, just shoot an email to me at Obulpathi at gmail. Also see my another comment above.
larrymcp 11y ago
Thanks; I hadn't seen that that page from Google and that's a pretty good idea to make that available. You know what would be a cool idea: if Google developed a method of copying an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to Google Cloud. That would give us an easy way to try out our same servers at Google without having to rebuild everything, as we do not use containers yet.