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Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

Right. So the Show HN page says you can barely go below $5 per gigabyte with on-demand pricing. OVH RAM instances consistently cost 1.33 $/GB for a machine with 30, 60, 120 or 240GB of RAM.

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I havent looked at OVH lately, but are they really a cloud? Do they provide full VPC with central firewall? Dynamic network disk storage that can be mapped to servers?

How does EBS work, anyway? Is it some form of NFS with caching under the hood?

It's not NFS, it's a block storage mechanism. NFS presents a file-based interface, EBS is a block/device-based interface. The underlying implementation isn't widely publicized, but if you think about how a block device works on a Unix and the AWS bigger-is-faster model for non-PIOPS EBS, you can probably draw some reasonable inferences.

PIOPS?

Provisioned/guaranteed IOPS.

EBS is some kind of Network Block Device. NFS is another product, https://aws.amazon.com/efs/

IIRC EBS is based on GNBD.

Such rumors have been around for quite a while -- Amazon is not talking -- but their relevant patent https://www.google.com/patents/US8769186 has

> For example, in at least some embodiments, a representative logical local block data storage device may be made available to an executing program via use of GNBD (“Global Network Block Device”) technology.

OVH does have their vRack stuff these days, but it's iffy and clearly intended for dedicated hardware. They have no block storage that I'm aware of.

They do have it: https://www.ovh.com/ca/en/public-cloud/storage/additional-di...

It's OpenStack Cinder.

They also have object storage, Swift: https://www.ovh.com/ca/en/public-cloud/storage/object-storag...

TIL, thanks! Didn't realize OVH was OpenStack--that's a pretty hard no for me, because I've witnessed firsthand the failure conditions there, but I appreciate the correction.

If all you need is compute and RAM, then OVH dedicated machines are a great choice; I used them for a long time myself and would again for personal stuff. That said, it's important to remember that focusing on that to the exclusion of turn-key services (RDS has saved clients of mine tens of thousands of dollars in billable hours just by itself) doesn't do you so well once you need more than that.

OVH have a beta RDS-like service. https://www.runabove.com/index.xml

When they have RDS and Redshift and and Athena and SQS and SNS and when they have a fully-functional API that crosses every platform I need to write code against and years of a proven track record of stone-cold simplicity and success, I am sure I will take that into account.

Time is valuable. AWS/GCE/Azure have a huge head start in making us more productive.

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