Hacker News Reader

Comment by 013a | Hacker News Reader

> Lightsail: Amazon’s hosting provider (vps, dns, storage)

Doesn't feel like accurate description for Lightsail, nor a useful one. Maybe something like "simplified deployment and billing for some AWS resources, including VPS, databases, DNS, and load balancers"

(listing "storage" as something Lightsail does is kind of weird; of course, it does instance-attached block storage, you couldn't have a VPS without that. critically, it has no S3-like blob storage product, and I think that's what most people would associate the general word "storage" with, but maybe I'm wrong about that).

View on HN

Sometimes I feel it is easier described by saying what its main competitor is.

Lightsail is basically AWS' version of Heroku and App Engine.

(i.e. a PAAS)

I wish Google would also do this. Many times on GCP's website or at Google Next you try to decipher what the product is that they are talking about, then you realise "ah, it is their version of S3, CloudFormation etc". If they just had said that at the start...

Of course, no company will do this, unfortunately.

I've seen companies post feature comparison charts listing competitors, they are very useful when switching from a different provider or discovering what the product does in terms of established player

Your statement made me wonder if someone else had done this, and sure enough I found something -- https://www.cloudcomparisontool.com/

Look for "Object Storange" for instance and in the row will be links to all the competing services, so you could pretty easily do this to learn about competitors through the one you know... At least for the big players.

Isn't this wrong? At Google's Storage options, it says Google doesn't have Backup or Disaster Recovery options.

As long as I know, aren't those types into Cloud Storage - nearline and coldline object storage types?

Though, you risk the nuances of the comparison being lost.

Lightsail is not comparable to Heroku or App Engine. Its comparable to Linode or Digital Ocean. Its not a PaaS; its a simplified VPS provider.

Heroku and App Engine operate at the application layer, with limited direct access to the underlying operating system.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com