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Comment by JSavageOne | Hacker News Reader

Yes Google Cloud Run is my go-to for all my side projects, and AWS doesn't have anything equivalent. Never saw any reason to use AWS for that reason as Google has everything else I'd need. And if I just want a cheap VPS, would prefer to use something cheaper like Linode or Digital Ocean.

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Is google so cheap?

I am a small fish in the big sea but I use this for my personal projects:

https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/

GCP and AWS are cheap for small and low traffics applications. But once your usage passes a certain point, you'll quickly find out they're more expensive than other vendors. The problem is, once you reached that point, you're probably already locked yourself in by using their specific offerings not found anywhere else. Limiting yourself to plain vps/containers/k8s might help preventing lock in.

And yet many large enterprises with existing data centers have made forays into cloud only to discover how stunningly expensive it is once the free credits run out.

It’s a classic walled garden strategy

If you limit yourself you will end up paying a ton.

As always it depends what you need. If you think you might need a database that's not MySQL and maybe a bucket to host your images and static assets then nearlyfreespeech is already not a good match any more if you prefer to have everything in one place.

For small projects or Wordpress installations you can of course find a lot of very cheap or even free options as it's such a commodity by now.

In my experience of using both, AWS AppRunner is as good as Cloud Run except you can’t scale AppRunner down to 0 instances so it has an ongoing cost.

It basically doesn't have the main thing that makes Cloud Run so valuable.

Speaking more generally, it seems AWS is allergic to creating products that scale to zero nowadays.

App Runner is an abstraction on top of FarGate designed to compete with Cloud Run, which is why it doesn’t scale down to zero. I too haven’t found anything that beats the simplicity of a GCP deployment sigh..

If it doesn't scale down to zero, then it doesn't compete with Cloud Run.

It depends on use case. Some corps don't care about down to zero.

In fact, I was waiting for years for them to add a min instances option. But otherwise, agree, been running large and small production workloads since it launched and its been great.

Scaling down to zero appeals to amateur side project folks - no enterprise customer probably cares about that marginal expense here..

It really depends on which workloads. We have teams working only on FinOps to optimize our architecture to take advantage of various cloud pricing models.

Enterprise spend on cloud is a massive topic right now and definitely in the spotlight. A consensus is developing that the current implementation of public cloud promotes lock-in and overall much more expensive at scale.

Cloud is complex and engineers are expensive. Instead of throwing CPU cycles and disk at the problem (which is cheap compared to engineer time), we are nickel-and-dimeing everything, and changing our architectures to hack the cloud pricing models. It's pretty silly.

According to my anedoctal experience, that's grossly wrong across many industries.

I've paid $0.00 for my many AWS Lambda functions, and will always pay $0 so long as I keep it under 1 million executions per month (and AWS keeps this free tier going). I also use SimpleDB, SES, and other services that also cost $0.00/mo. The only thing I pay for is S3, which totals about $0.30 per month, for a few gigs of data. And I'm very happy with AWS, It's been costing me less than $6 per year to build out and run a complex web app, albeit with no users. But still, AWS absolutely does scale down to zero very nicely.

Sure. Just note all products you mentioned are rather old. When AWS announces anything serverless nowadays, things do not scale to zero.

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