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Comment by jMyles | Hacker News Reader

I've lost track of the characteristics of the players in this space. Do Rackspace or DigitalOcean have anything that even compares?

I've always used Rackspace as a sort of default. They seem to employ good people, so they must be good - so the thinking goes.

But what's the real breakdown between these three? And any others I might not know about?

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AWS is a giant construction store like Home Depot, where you can find everything. Rackspace is local home improvement shop, with good service, which was doing fine until Home Depot build it's store nearby. Now people have less and less reasons to visit it. Some folks like it for the old times sake, though. DigitalOcean is your buddy who works at "Hammer&Nails Manufacturing Inc.", he can get you nice hammers and nails pretty cheap if you ask him, but not much else.

That's how I see it :)

What do you do with your analogy now that Rackspace offers official support for helping you with your AWS and Azure deployments? Are the general contractors who started the local hardware store now also working a side job at Home Depot? ;)

Local shop owner offers consulting service - go with you to the Home Depot and help you find right things for your project (and hoping next time you'll go the his shop, after you see how good he is) :)

RAX only offers support for Azure, not AWS...

Except that Rackspace revenue is still growing steadily year over year at a solid pace, so clearly not everyone agree with the "less and less reasons to visit it"

I think they are growing much slower than the industry and competition from AWS makes their margin razor thin. Latest quarter report shows that revenue growth was only 1.6% over previous quarter and profit margin of 0.6%, and their shares are down more than 60% since 2013 maximum (on the growing market). So, overall it doesn't look very good.

DO is for people who want root access to a commodity VM at the lowest price possible.

Rackspace is for people who want root access to a commodity VM and are willing to pay more for support.

AWS is for people who are willing to ditch commodity VMs and replace them with orchestrated services. (They'll sell you a commodity VM via EC2, but if that's all you want there's not a lot of reason to go with them.)

Rackspace's problem is that this segmentation puts them in the awkward position of being the wrong choice for the extremely price-sensitive (who go with DO 'cause it's cheap, or with even cheaper alternatives like Dreamhost) and the wrong choice for the "money is no object" crowd (who go with AWS, because at scale working with orchestrated services is much easier than managing huge fleets of persistent VMs). Which ends up not leaving a whole lot of people for them to sell to.

Google has CloudSQL (=MySQL) and BigQuery, which is SQL-ish.

https://cloud.google.com/sql/

https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/

Lets not talk about how much of a pain CloudSQL is to use

Really? I'd love to hear about it, please drop me a line.

(Disclaimer: I work on Google Cloud, although not on SQL specifically.)

I'd like to hear it also. We are using it and never had much to complain about.

It should be Google Cloud Datastore, not BigQuery.

The closest thing to Aurora would be Clustrix; scale at the storage level behind a single entry point.

Aurora is more than just RDBMS as a service.

You could just install a Galera cluster on DO and it'd function similarily, and tbh, that is possibly what they did.

Ignoring the benchmark BS [which is almost always BS] basically they are offering:

> With storage replicated both within and across three Availability Zones, along with an update model driven by quorum writes, Amazon Aurora is designed to deliver high performance and 99.99% availability while easily and efficiently scaling to up to 64 TB of storage.

Galera is quorum writes [basically], can scale to ~6 nodes pretty effectively [more than 6 you run into issues with write performance imho. This would be a 2/2/2 for 3 availability zone setup].

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/Concep...

Galera's synchronous write process means you want everything near each other geographically, so 3 AZs in the same region would make perfect sense.

> Along the way, they verified that each Amazon Aurora instance is able to deliver on our performance target of up to 100,000 writes and 500,000 reads per second, along with a price to performance ratio that is 5 times better than previously available.

That is literally the read/write ratio you'll see on a 6 node Galera cluster. Reads scale per-node [reads are local], but writes don't [every node has to perform the write + the replication overhead].

So yeah, you can set something similar up with any provider with 3 geographically near DCs.

https://www.digitalocean.com/features/reliability/

DO has that setup in NYC and AMS, at least I assume NYC1/2/3 AMS1/2/3 are different AZ equivalents.

http://www.slideshare.net/bytebot/mysql-in-the-hosted-cloud

DigitalOcean gives you a VPS with root access, nothing else. They have some pre-built images (LAMP, Rails...) but it is your Job to get everything up an running.

This is generally preferable since it protects you from vendor lock-in.

Yes, not using any vendor's products protects you from vendor lock-in. To call that "generally preferable" is awfully simplistic though.

In this case there's little lock-in, since it maintains InnoDB interface compatibility - you could drop-in replace it with, say, a DigitalOcean-hosted MySQL instance, if you wanted. (Of course you'd be missing out on other perks, but your core MySQL integration wouldn't suffer lock-in.)

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