Comment by atmosx
20 hours ago
Comparing EU cloud providers to AWS is like comparing a 1963 Zastava to 2025 high end BYD because both of them are cars and can drive from point A to point B.
20 hours ago
Comparing EU cloud providers to AWS is like comparing a 1963 Zastava to 2025 high end BYD because both of them are cars and can drive from point A to point B.
Well, if the Zastava had 5-10x the amount of horsepower and storage space of the BYD for the same amount of money. Because that’s what is often the reality. Bare metal is unreasonably efficient compared to cloud services for not that much more know-how.
I do tech DD work for investment funds etc and one thing I often see are slow, complex and expensive AWS-heavy architectures that optimize for problems the company doesn’t have and often will never have. In theory to ensure stability and scalability. They are usually expensive and have nightmarish configuration complexity.
In practice complexity tends to lead to more outages and performance issues than if you had a much simpler (rented) bare metal setup with some spare capacity and better architecture design. More than half of serious outages I have seen documented in these reviews came from configuration mistakes or bugs in software that is supposed to manage your resources.
Nevermind that companies invest serious amounts of time in trying to manage complexity rather than remove it.
A few years ago I worked for a company that had two competing systems. One used AWS sparingly: just EC2, S3, RDS and load balancers. The other went berserk in the AWS candy shop and was this monstrosity that used 20-something different AWS services glued together by lambdas. This was touted as “the future”, and everyone who didn’t think it was a good idea was an idiot.
The simple solution cost about the same to run for a few thousand (business customers) as the complex one cost for ONE customer. The simple solution cost about 1/20 to develop. It also had about 1/2500 the latency on average because it wasn’t constantly enqueuing and dequeueing data through a slow SQS maze of queues.
And best of all: you could move the simpler solution to bare metal servers. In fact, we ran all the testing on clusters of 6 RPIs. The complex solution was stuck in AWS forever.
All aws is selling a web gui on top of free software. You still have to know ins and outs of the software to manage it properly.
Heck their support is shit too. I have talked to them to figure out an issue on their own in house software, they couldn’t help. My colleague happened to know what was wrong and fixed the issue with a switch of a checkbox.
Hetzner doesn't even have an RDS service. I've heard rumors for years but they haven't done it. Also, while I agree that leaning too much on the cloud leads to lock-in - this is an abstract concept that needs to be guarded against when managing technology, always, anyway - and vendor-driven hellish architectures, "vanilla cloud" offers other conveniences other than compute, bucket, storage managed and load balancers, like IAM, good CLIs, secrets management, etc. Only Scaleway or OVH seem to be timidly developing what I would consider "vanilla cloud".
Out of interest, what control plane do you use for a Hetzner/metal setup? Kubernetes ecosystem?
I use Coolify for side projects, haven’t investigated whether I’d want to use it for bigger/importanter stuff.
+1 for bare metal! I wish I could convince more C level people that that's what we need most of the time.
The Zastava doesn't have a bunch of superfluous computers that track you, is easy to service, and reliable?
when you compare IT stuff to cars, the discussion pivots to discussing cars, please think twice before using any analogies / comparisons with the physical world
But discussing cars is great, just like the Porsche 964 Carrera 4 Jubilee.
Or the Porsche 356 A. Or the Alfa Romeo Giulia sprint veloce.
But that is what people actually want.
I want a 1985 Mercedes that is build like a tank and outlives me.
I know that's not what you really meant, but as an unrelated tangent, modern cars are safer exactly because they're not built like tanks. The car crumpling up even at the smallest of crashes is good, because the more the car crumples, the less any of the impact is transferred to the passengers. It might mean the car is totaled and you need a new one, but that's better than someone in the car being totaled.
Yes, modern cars are superior when it comes to safety. But the daily experience is orthogonal to this since most people have serious accidents very infrequently. In your daily experience reliability and economy is more important.
And in computing, having a bit of downtime 1-2 times per year is often a price worth paying if avoiding it requires 90% more cost and effort. (Of course, people end up having downtime anyway because they have something so complex that they have 100x the number of ways something can fail).
Hm, equating AWS to a 1963 Zastava is pretty demeaning to the Zastava. At least the Zastava was cheap junk, not premium-priced junk.
Except 95% of companies have no need of ultra scalable super cloud.
If you are a very big SaaS company that is not Google or Apple, you are probably serving hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of unique users. AWS may be convenient, but you don't /need/ it, you can build an infrastructure that will handle such workload with any of the big european providers.
You'll just lose in comfort what you'll gain in data sovereignty and infrastructure costs.
I worked for a 7M€ MRR company that had maybe a million of users who used the software every day. The thing ran on a dozen of OVH servers, including multi-site redundancy.
Exactly. AWS proposition was much more alluring where compute was more expensive and it required yearly estimations and updates.
In times when one physical server can have 32, 64 or even 96 cores... you pack your own little datacenter right there and it's pretty cheap to simply overkill it, have one or two servers for redundancy and bye.
So many businesses will happily run from 4 core 10usd VPS (that would have been beefy server 20 years ago).
I think it’s more about the absolutely stripped model vs the loaded one.
The basic services are more or less the same, but the hyperscalers provide hundreds of services where smaller providers have only ten.
Some of those services are utter crap though..
This is just my opinion, but there are some services that just package software as VM and let's you spawn it with a fancy button, leaving you with a largely unmanaged instance.
There are other services like S3, BigQuery or SQS that feels like magic.
AWS is overrated junk, got it.
Well, isn’t it?
It is easy to argue that it is expensive and complex. Since it is. And lots of people have made that argument. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone argue in favor of AWS while skimming the threads here.
So this is your opportunity to make the case for AWS.
I am not arguing for AWS.
It _used_ to be great and free tier made it easy enough to migrate most personal use cases to their infrastructure. But they have enshittified the free tier to a point where it’s unusable without forking over obscene amounts of money.
Plus their support is non-existent unless you are one of those big corps.
Plus for a 1T+ company. You would think that their infrastructure would be top tier, never go done, best practices?
Nope. us-east1 continues to be dogshit and their typical response is to fork over more money for multi region and zone support.
And yes, the scale at which aws advertises is largely overkill for many companies. Even some Fortune 500.
But technology is driven by clueless C-level executives that get easily impressed by deck presentations from aws marketing.
Instead of investing in workforce. They invest in cLoUd.
It’s a huge joke.
I promise you, a person buying a vehicle for their business will be looking at ROI rather then smart features.
Computing at this scale is not marketed to flashy fanbois.
> Computing at this scale is not marketed to flashy fanbois.
Every vain CxO is a flashy fanboi at heart
Scaleway (maybe upcloud as well) are also great and atleast Scaleway from what I know has many many features and its really competitive with the offerings it provides in general and has many offerings.
Your point's a little moot.