[ComputerGuru]

So what are HNers using IBM Cloud for and where do you see that it has an edge over AWS offerings (where an overlap exists, obviously)?

(I figure either you’re in devops and you are putting out fires too busy to read this thread or you’re not and your work is halted because of the incident so you might have time to read and reply ;)

[paranoidrobot]

My previous job used Softlayer heavily.

Two of the biggest advantages were:

Price for hardware. As a base price, their bare-metal gear was significantly cheaper than equivalent-specced AWS gear (if it was even possible to get something like that). We managed to snag quite a few 'interesting' configurations of things at various times that you just couldn't get at all in AWS. Things like PCI SSDs, very large RAM configs, or High-Frequency low-core count CPUs.

Free international/regional transfer. We took significant advantage of this to move data around. We'd replicate TBs of data around.

At various times management and dev teams would complain and say that we should move everything to AWS (or whatever cloud provider they'd just met with at a conference).

We consistently showed higher performance and lower cost by significant margins. On cost alone, we were paying a small fraction of what it'd cost on AWS, even after taking into consideration ways to reduce cost on AWS such as scaling, spot instances and reserved-instances.

[jgalt212]

I really would like to see an AWS memo which maps out common use cases and expected costs (selling points) vs actual use cases and actual costs (pain points).

[paranoidrobot]

I don't think there's one good answer for everyone that's going to be right.

I think the biggest issue is that far too many people assume that the AWS Savings stories are universally applicable, and that it's safe to assume AWS is going to be the cheap option.

I'm sure there are folks for whom AWS is the cheap option, but it wasn't at my last job, and it's not for my current one (even though they are using it).

[goatherders]

Surely not from AWS themselves. They have zero reason to disclose data showing how expensive their services are relative to expectations.

[dahfizz]

> They have zero reason to disclose data showing how expensive their services are relative to expectations.

A cynic might argue that is why their pricing structure is so complicated in the first place.

[dsmcr]

More likely their service offerings are growing so fast that trying to make the pricing structure coherent is like a hyper-aggressive game of whack-a-mole.

[toast0]

We used Softlayer (rebranded to IBM Cloud, and affected by this) at my last job. For the most part, their service pretty much just works; clearly not today. :)

We had a couple thousand bare metal servers, and barely used any of their API stuff.

As with any facility, there were occasional issues with electrical transfer switches, core router failures, fiber cuts, etc. Stuff happens, but we got pretty good communication, and things got resolved in a reasonable amount of time. Service got noticeably worse after IBM, but we were already planning to move to our acquirers hosting, because that's what happens when you're acquired. Oh, and their load balancers had garbage uptime.

Bandwidth prices used to be pretty reasonable, but they've adopted AWS style obscene pricing. At least they still let you use the private network for free (including to other datacenters).

[dang]

HN ran on a box at Softlayer until early 2018 or so. This makes me think that the title of this post (which was submitted as "IBM Cloud down as well as their status page which looks to be hosted there") could at some point have been "IBM Cloud down as well as their status page which looks to be hosted there as well as the forum where people post these things which also looks to be hosted there".

[pvg]

HN ran on a box at Softlayer

I've always imagined it as a big tower shoved under someone's desk. The side panel of the case is off because otherwise it overheats. On the screen there's a single maximized window of DrRacket. A post it note warns you not to quit or reboot the system.

[MaxBarraclough]

And there's a switch set to More magic.

[dreamer7]

Maybe that's the new location :)

[po]

If it was a BGP issue, it's not a problem of where the status page is hosted but instead that you just can't get to it via that name no matter where it's hosted, right?

[peterwwillis]

If by "name" you mean hostname, not really. If you have a domain with multiple nameservers in multiple countries on multiple providers, and your site is similarly globally distributed, at least a few people on the internet will always be able to pull up your site. So at least some of your clients will be able to resolve a domain address from at least some of your nameservers and connect to at least some of your web servers. Geo-IP and Anycast are also really useful here.

edit: It's possible that you could take out an entire TLD and make it impossible to resolve domains on that TLD once all the cached records expire. But that kind of targeted attack would not be possible with a BGP error, unless it was a very specifically crafted BGP error happening over a very long period of time (weeks-months-years depending on the record TTLs).

[po]

ok, that makes sense but you'd still at least have: if the site is down due to BGP then so is the status page that is on the same domain.

I guess I'm just calling out the people who are making fun of them for having their status page dependent on the same hardware it's monitoring when it's not clear that's the case just because they are both down?

I would suppose if it's a different TLD domain, then it would be more likely to conclude that.

[peterwwillis]

A status page should be a static site hosted on multiple providers in multiple regions with multiple nameservers. So, Amazon S3 hosted in 2 regions, Azure Storage hosted in 2 different regions, 2 different nameserver providers in 2 different countries using two different backend colo providers. Costs probably <$150/year and that will survive BGP outages, backhaul link outages, hosting provider outages, DNS outages.

I'm not going to make fun of them for their status page being down, but it certainly doesn't reflect well on the brand/products.

[ipsum2]

Where does HN run now?

[dang]

M5. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041

[dsmcr]

You guys were one of the best use cases for the SL model, which really hasn't changed in 10+ years. You had very few dependencies on the less-reliable (read: all of them) services inside the SL stack and mostly managed everything on box and in software. In a few POPs you guys were running about 50% of the total SL backbone bandwidth. There were a lot of sad panda hats when you guys started to transition away.

[toast0]

> There were a lot of sad panda hats when you guys started to transition away.

For us as well. It was so nice to have things work one day and the next and the next, although I guess they wouldn't have worked today.

Favorite firefighting moment was when wdc lost half the fiber in ~ 2014, and we had to move all of our traffic out, so that there was capacity. Our guy asked why we had to move? and your guy said something like 'Because if you guys move, we only need one customer to move.' :D

[dsmcr]

Yeah the move from FreeBSD to Linux wouldn't have been fun for you guys either. And yeah, the WDC POPs were some of the most overbuilt from a bandwidth perspective and that was almost entirely because of you guys. Pretty sure there's a Cisco sales rep enjoying a nice holiday home in Connecticut as a result of the growth you guys did.

[Scoundreller]

Dunno if I should realize who toast0 is, but what service were/are you running?

[matthijs]

Probably WhatsApp, they moved from FreeBSD to Linux and were on SL before the Facebook acquisition.

[toast0]

I don't think you are expected to know who I am :) I omitted the service on purpose, but you my email is on my profile if you want to know.

Apparently it was enough information for dsmcr to properly id the service though; not enough for nixgeek though, I think.

[Scoundreller]

I won't ask that directly. It just seemed like I was missing something that everyone else knew.

[dsmcr]

Sorry, didn't mean to put you on blast like that.

[simscitizen]

They’re talking about WhatsApp.

[dylz]

I had a high bandwidth use case that SL filled when I was a kid - but we went through resellers 10TB/UK2, later 100TB after that was a thing, then they dropped SL and every one of SL's products became AWS-priced levels of insane per GB bandwidth.

The odd thing is, for half the price I could get SL service w/10TB from a reseller, while at list price I only got 1-2TB bandwidth, and sales absolutely would not budge on that. I wonder why.

[nixgeek]

Last job for me was also a few thousand bare metal servers at SoftLayer. Acquired and moved to that infrastructure instead. Wonder if its the same acquisition? :-)

[dsmcr]

FWIW - IBM Cloud today has basically no benefit over AWS, Azure or GCE or even against some of the smaller regional players like AliCloud. The notable exception would be if you need to run a bare metal solution and leverage their free backbone which is a pretty narrow use case these days. The main selling point previously was to stand up your own VMware environment but even that came with a laundry list of caveats (unsupported hardware, limited VLANs, non-flexible IP space) that made it painful to use. Today AWS is vastly more performant, flexible, reliable and has a bunch of useful services you don't get from IBM Cloud.

[nojito]

Price isn’t a benefit?

[dsmcr]

It would be except IBM Cloud is never cheaper than AWS.

[Xenoamorphous]

If we speak specifically about IBM Cloud vs AWS, we use the Natural Language Understanding API in IBM Cloud and as far as I know the equivalent AWS offering, Comprehend, doesn't provide named entity disambiguation nor links to knowledge graphs (IBM links to DBpedia).

MS and Google do provide those features though.

[dsmcr]

Unfortunately, that API changes regularly and often in undocumented ways that causes breakages for customers. Its really a lot of fun to deal with when suddenly a bunch of automation breaks and it turns out an unannounced push fundamentally re-writes foundational API calls.

[fieldmarshal]

We have been leasing bare metal servers since the pre-IBM Softlayer days.

Over the past few years we have experienced quite a few network-related outages. Not usually to this extent, more generally a failure of some piece of network gear that takes out either backend or frontend traffic from a particular data center. We seriously priced out a migration to another provider recently, but in the end what held us back was cross-AZ transfer costs on AWS. We found it would raise our operating costs significantly, so the matter was dropped.

We were much happier with the service and support we received prior to the IBM acquisition.

[sky_rw]

I had originally signed up due to the availability and pricing of bare metal servers and the mixed Windows/Linux server offerings. Their windows server licensing was better than AWS and I didn't want to be on Azure for a variety of reasons.

Currently on them because we have an OpenVPN based infrastructure that is very challenging to migrate.

Lastly the majority of our customers are in the midwest or Texas, and the proximity of their Dallas DC was a huge performance win for us.

[manquer]

Rarely it is a just technical decision, usually money is the reason.

In small and mid size organizations the CSP gave better pricing, or they help with your sales etc

In large organizations - IBM/Oracle bundle their existing products currently being paid for any way, or account managers have great relationships with decision makers , the company already has signed up big multi year deals.

This is not just IBM, it applies to GCP/Azure/AWS as well.

[nihil75]

I like OpenWhisk which is the basis for their serverless compute offering. Has orchestration/state-machine functionality that makes it superior to GCP Cloud Functions, and uses Docker containers which makes it more flexible than AWS Lambda.

I also really like CouchDB which IBM Cloudant is based on.

Is that enough for me to use IBM cloud? no. not really.

[spydum]

I suspect nobody really uses it outside of weird outsourced financial modelling/planning tools like TM1 and other apps people stopped wanting to manage themselves.

[freehunter]

I work as a consultant with big enterprise companies and I can assure you big enterprise companies are using IBM very heavily. As well as Oracle and HP and other uncool tech companies.

[rezonant]

We use Restream.io and Solar Winds Papertrail, both were down today, my guess is they use IBM Cloud itself or some rackspace that IBM's rented to other clouds, which is apparently typical at the edge of the major public cloud regions