Ask HN: Digital Ocean vs. AWS

DigitalOcean is just servers. While I use it for personal projects I would have a hard time moving a production workload that requires anything beyond a couple servers there.

While I love their service and recommend it often they would do well to add at least a few basic services (load balancers, S3-like storage, etc) on top of their current offering.

You might want to check if digital ocean offers ELB or virtual IP as others might call it. Look at your detailed billing on AWS to help you make the decision. Another thing you might want to consider is how do you provision? How much effort would it take you to move from AMI to Ansible, Chef or such if you decided to move off AWS? You may also want to look at Linode (not affiliated with them)

AWS is a much more mature service. It is more of a work to create Load Balancers etc on DO as of now. Would highly recommend continuing with AWS for production environments. Our product is currently on DO but we would be migrating to AWS soon

If your app can run with just the h/w (CPU,Disk,RAM) available @ D-O you can do the migration. AFAIK, D-O does not have EBS like storage, which is essential in case there is lot of data that needs to be stored.

I have couple of sites (pretty low traffic) [nodejs, hhvm] running on D-O with pretty good uptime (> 1 year)

I'd recommend you to jot things down w.r.t what all things you have in terms of CPU, Disk, Memory, Apps, Server Usage over a week/month/year period and then see if the instances @ D-O can help.

Also, plan for future growth of the App, Just in case there is a sudden spike in traffic, there might be sudden need for additional Storage. In such scenario, with D-O you need to buy new servers, with EC2 you can add another disk with ease and can scale on storage.

AFAIK, D-O does not have ELB, so we need to buy instances and run ATS, Nginx, HAproxy, etc to do the load-balancing

They are both pretty great, and there are other companies such as linode and atlantic.net (disclaimer: i work for them) that might be good fit. AWS have a lot of services and features, but depends on what you are looking for. You can certainly run node.js, mongo, and rabbitmq with relative ease and cost on DO or anything. All the services I mentioned are pretty reliable so you don't need to worry about it. You can also use AWS for certain things, and others for your primary hosting. Anyways, good luck! Feel free to PM me if you have any specific questions regarding migration since we do it all the time.

Moving from AWS to DO will force you to handle a lot more devops/IT stuff to work around network and api reliability issues. So to make that worth it, it'd really depend on how much money you are looking to save and on the IT/devops resources you have available.

AWS may be more expensive, but perhaps instead of migrating away from AWS to another provider, you can start using AWS more efficiently. Most people I've helped out in similar situations were able to reduce their AWS bills between 50-75%.

AWS is the best in the game and you pay a little extra for it. If you ask me I think it's worth it.

I wouldn't waste a single cycles migrating to another cloud providing to save a little money. In the end it simply won't be worth the time and you'll miss running on AWS's mature platform.

Instead, I would focus on getting your app working perfectly within linux containers. Use some existing tools such as swarm, CoreOS, or Tutum[0]. Once you have your app properly containerized, you'll be able to quickly move between clouds or even utilize multiple clouds (provided you have the time or experience to maintain the network).

The only way you'll save significant money is if you're willing to put up the resources to run your own prem, and I would strongly discourage you from doing that.

[0] https://www.tutum.co/

I've found DO is great for running RabbitMQ as a hub to process background jobs across multiple VMs. It's relatively simple to hit DO's API to spin up new "droplets" as needed so your queue never gets overloaded. I use this architecture to create over 1MM website thumbnails per day across 10+ VMs and it's been extremely reliable.

I currently use App Engine to handle front end requests and storage so I can't comment as much there, but DO's integration with Mesosphere sounds promising for scaling and reliability.

More here - https://digitalocean.mesosphere.com/ https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an-introduc...

I found DO's support lacking when my VM instance was down and unable to be brought back up (it eventually came back up on its own a few hours later, without any explanation for the downtime). It's something that has kept me from recommending DO for production use to companies.

# IPv6

One advantage with Digital Ocean is that they support IPv6[1] in 1+ region.

AWS still doesn't offer meaningful IPv6 support (not in VPCs, not on EC2 nodes, not for CloudFront).

[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/announcing-ipv6-su...

# Cost

Can you give a rough breakdown of the bill itself, as well as utilization numbers (CPU) and number of instances over the last ~7 days.

That'll make it easier for people to provide feedback.

I used to use DO for little side projects. It was good enough for that. There were random reboots but didn't mind it so much at the time.

When trying to pay (had some free credit before) they blocked my account and asked me to contact support to verify myself. The support person asked me if I can give them my fb or twitter account to verify myself. Kind of weird, but sure... I give them my fb, just to be told that my fb name doesn't match my CC name. Lol, I wouldn't give you my fb if I knew that's why you wanted it. And no, I cannot verify my CC name really, nobody has ever cared online in my whole life. I just gave up at this point and been using AWS ever since.

do make sure you secure internal inter-vm traffic with tls/ssl on digital ocean. there is no private networking, DO only offers shared 'private' networking that's common to all tenants. google compute engine is worth a look as well in terms of a 'real' cloud provider, cheaper prices & sustained usage billing discounts, instant scaling on load balancers, s3 api compatible file storage, etc.

If you want to save money in AWS, you can buy Reserved Instances. You will achieve relatively the same price of Digital Ocean.

Both of the cloud providers are great (AWS and DigitalOcean) - but all depends on what are you are going to use it for. DigitalOcean offers better value for money and is focusing more on developers who have smaller projects in hand, but AWS (although more pricey), will give you more additional features with the support for infrastructure.

If you are concerned about infrastructure why don't you check out www.cloud66.com. You might find it very helpful also you can have a look at the help page with the node.js migration to any cloud provider http://blog.cloud66.com/moving-your-nodejitsu-apps-to-cloud-.... (Disclaimer: I am working for Cloud 66)

If not using aws features like auto scaling , elastic load balancing etc. you most likely spending more money that needed if you are on AWS.

If you just need compute Digital Ocean, Vultr, Linode, and several others are all hands down better than EC2 for price/performance. I use Digital Ocean and Vultr and have had few issues with either of them in the reliability sphere either.

If you need permanent always-on systems (inelastic demand) I'd also look into OVH/Kimsufi, since they have extremely good deals on bare metal in their Quebec or French locations.

EC2 becomes attractive when you want to use Amazon's whole stack, or when you need the ability to flex up to enormous sizes. I'm not sure I'd bet on the smaller providers being able to hand you 10,000 instances on short notice.

Additional question: Amazon instructs you to engineer for failure, and to expect any individual instance to fail at any moment.

How is DO in this regard? Do they randomly drop droplets or are they, for lack of a better word, persistent?