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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

> While setting up a data center can cost millions of dollars, small Nigerian teams have found a workaround to this with “colocation”

Isn't that what everyone does when starting up a hosting company?

Looking at the websites of those companies, I also wouldn't characterize them as AWS or Google Cloud competitors. They offer Virtual Private Servers, FTP storage, maybe an S3 equivalent and Kubernetes. Maybe we can talk about S3 and Kubernetes being AWS-like, but those that offer only Virtual Servers and FTP space are competitors to "boring" web hosting services, no matter how often they use the word cloud.

It's cool that these services also exist in Nigeria, and I think it's right that Nigerian websites use Nigerian infrastructure. But the article does a poor job talking about it

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We're pretty far into the "ditching cloud" hype cycle at the moment. While I think both sides have valid arguments, I think the whole drama tends to lead to unhelpful titles like this one.

Using this same criteria, I'm "building an affordable alternative to AWS" in my house by deploying an HA instance of Proxmox.

I don't think revenue numbers reflect that we are in a ditching the cloud hype cycle, particularly given emerging political risks.. At any given time there is hype for every possibility with controversy or ramifications and the software market is so much larger than what many of us were used to that any group seems large enough to be most of the market.

Oh, I agree entirely with you. When I say hype, I mean there's a lot of positivity around these "We left the cloud" blog posts. I sit in a position within my company where I make these types of decisions (how our infrastructure is provisioned), and every few weeks or so for the past year I've gotten sent some blog post about X company moving off the cloud and reaping Y benefits.

I estimate that many of these cases were self-inflicted with a general misunderstanding of the cloud pricing model. Amazon has a literal pipeline (AKA certificate program) to maximize its revenue. It's so bad that I now include interview questions trying to suss these individuals out (design me X system, and the given solution uses 15 different AWS services).

Now, that's not an entirely fair representation of the problem, as I've seen genuine business cases that shouldn't be in the cloud, period. That's why I say both sides have an argument. But as I said, my opinion is that actual cloud revenue suggests that it's just a vocal minority group spinning up most of the discussions.

>Looking at the websites of those companies, I also wouldn't characterize them as AWS or Google Cloud competitors

I'd say they're more "alternatives" at this point, as the article's title states.

But...

>They offer Virtual Private Servers, FTP storage, maybe an S3 equivalent and Kubernetes.

The number of AWS customers that could survive on these services alone is likely higher than we'd suspect, especially for small companies.

Throw in an RDS-equivalent and maybe load-balancing, and the number rises dramatically.

Of course, this also assumes the connective tissue is also in place (e.g. VPC, security groups, etc).

EDIT: I should've said "the number of AWS customers that currently survive on these services alone..."

> The number of AWS customers that could survive on these services alone is likely higher than we'd suspect, especially for small companies

They could, but they will not.If your AWS is small there is no real motive to look for alternatives. Just stick with the brand you know.

Even a lot of developers are very resistant to using something 'non-standard'.I have had "thats a weird thing to do" reactions to suggestions such as running Postgres on EC2 because it would be easier than using RDS for a small DB.

> If your AWS is small there is no real motive to look for alternatives. Just stick with the brand you know.

Lots of reasons. Maybe you want a vastly simpler interface and feature set. Maybe AWS doesn't offer servers in your country, and you've got sensitive data. Maybe the US is threatening your country with economic warfare, and you want to move away from US services.

I agree that those are good reasons. In my experience most people do not care about the simpler interface and feature set. They will put extra time into working with AWS or hiring an AWS expert rather than use something simpler. One reason is that non-technical management think something with a web UI is always simpler than doing things on the command line.

My favourite AWS service is Lightsail because it lets me ignore the rest of it and keep things simple.

People do care about the other two reasons, but only if there is an immediate risk. Most people only care about keeping sensitive data within their country if the law requires it, so that would only be a problem if you are in a country which has such laws, they apply to you with no loopholes, enforces them, and no AWS servers. Smaller companies will not plan for economic warfare unless it is an immediate risk - i.e. sanctions (there are only a few countries that are completely sanctioned).

The article is about Nigeria and AWS has no presence in Nigeria (and very little presence elsewhere in Africa) so there is probably more demand for alternatives there. In most of the world they do.

>They could, but they will not.

I intended to say "the number of AWS customers that currently survive on these services alone...". I've updated the comment.

My comment was aimed more at those who assume that providers offering only these services would mean they're technically non-competitive with AWS.

My overall point is that these services likely represent what many customers are actually using. If you're in an enterprise shop, this may be less true. Same if you're in a funded startup that's convinced it needs infinite scalability and architects accordingly.

But, I do agree that it's hard to convince people to resist the dogma. This may be changing as people are starting to question the value of Big Cloud vs its costs, but we'll have to wait for the dogma to follow to see any real change (for those who have access to Big Cloud).

Yeah...you're not really building an 'AWS' until you're building a hyperscaler and leveraging massive economies of scale. This is more "we're building a service that addressed local reality with local solutions", and that's a pretty awesome thing just in itself.

>you're not really building an 'AWS' until you're building a hyperscaler

AFAICT there's no claim that they're "building an AWS" (or attempting to). The title is "Nigerians are building affordable alternatives to AWS and Google Cloud".

So, these are alternatives and a skim of the article seems to follow.

I think we've been cloud-indoctrinated here (until recently) to believe viability means fullly-scalable cloud infrastructure.

I don't see the real difference between saying this and saying a Raspberry Pi is an alternative to AWS.

You're correct that there's an analogy continuum here that starts at "ridiculous" and ends with "nearly indistinguishable".

I suppose like many things, it's down to a reasonableness test.

You should get your eyes checked...

It’s also funny because AWS uses (or at least used) colo facilities as well. They just never advertised it afaik.

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