Ask HN: Which cloud provider to use in 2017? Azure, AWS or GCE?
Google cloud has grabbed a number of huge customer in 2016. However it doesn't seem to dent AWS's growth figures. I personally don't know much about Azure, but would love to find out.
Some criteria on which the clouds can be judged: Performance, Cost, Features and Ease of use
What do you guys think based on personal experiences?
Please refer relevant articles and benchmarks.
16 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 68.8 ms ] threadSo as someone who has been knee deep in Azure for around a year but who had previously used AWS for 2-3 years I would say: it depends. If you are looking at PaaS offerings, specifically around the application hosting side (not database) I would say Azure is an awesome fit. The idea of deployment slots in their Web Apps offering is really cool I think. I personally like the ARM templates for automation compared to something like AWS Cloud Formation. Of course if you are using a Microsoft stack the integration with Azure is going to be pretty tight. 3rd party products are bit hit or miss.
If you are looking to do all IaaS or some type of PaaS database outside of MSSQL I'd point you at AWS. I think all of the providers at the core level are probably pretty similar when it comes to IaaS VMs but AWS has a leg above when you look at the whole process. AWS has tons of tooling (both native and 3rd party) built around it, plus you can typically find answers for issues via Google, something I think that is less likely with Azure.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13501433
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That being said, I think for the traditional use cases they're all pretty comparable. I'd go with what's easier to learn/use and what will get better adoption in your org.
I think the ease of Azure Storage (Table/Blob/Queues) is pretty awesome, and getting up and running with Azure SQL is nice as well. Both are FAR easier to get started with than the AWS and GCE equivalents.
By comparison I think that AWS is really painful in the number of options for any given service, and their cost model makes it more expensive to get started with. On the flip side, it feels like Azure's compute nodes are pretty overpriced as well.
If you're willing to roll your own, Linode or DigitalOcean may be better options.
I haven't used GCE enough to comment really.
One major pro is Google Cloud's pricing was much more straightforward and easier to estimate.
I will say I find that Azure's service offerings (blobs, tables, queues, and sql) much easier to get started with, and for less cost than the AWS equivalents, but compute nodes are more expensive and less performant.
AWS for me personally was too complicated interface wise. It was easy to lose track of running instances and being billed for things, the vast amount of types of things you can spin up also made it sometimes hard to navigate without lots of reading. I think if one of my side projects ever gets to a point where it needs a CDN, scalable EC2 instances and things like that, I'd research AWS, but probably only move to it if I had to. With all this said I do use Amazon SES for my newsletters I run as it's so cheap, I send a 4k subscriber list an email a week, costs about 60p a month.
Digital Ocean is my go to. It's stupidly easy to use, a great UI, genuinely a pleasure to use even compared to work VMWare enterprise stuff. I've been thinking lately about AWS due to load balancing being built in without me having to run my own keepalived stuff, but DO have announced load balancers are almost ready, so I'm rethinking. Here's a shameless referral link that'll give you some free credit: https://m.do.co/c/f24e8a65668a
Azure is Ok. It's not great, it could be worse. The original interface is now called 'legacy', and that's good because it was pretty bad. The new one is a lot nicer to use, but as someone who's biased towards Mac/Linux for the desktop, it feels like Microsoft designed it. It can be a bit clunky, it can be difficult to figure out what the IP of something is instead of its hostname or to jump between different places without having to go through tons of breadcrumbs.
Price wise you can figure that out yourself using publicly available calculators, specific to your needs. DO is probably slightly more than AWS, but for the instant VM spin up from a really nice drag-drop UI (with lots of prebuilt images), easy automated backup, auto SSH key deployment and so on - I can't see myself leaving DO unless I have a specific requirement they can't meet.