Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by realusername 454 days ago
They try hard to brand themselves as a cloud provider but I'd say that they mostly are a VPS provider.

The cloud side isn't polished enough to pretend to be a cloud provider.

3 comments

I wouldn’t describe Google nor Microsofts products as ”polished”. Humongous maybe?
Yes, especially Azure's success seems largely driven by their generous free tier for startups and the lock-in of the Windows ecosystem.

While I like the user interface, after having used it for more than a year I've successfully stayed away from it ever since.

Meanwhile AWS' popularity was largely driven by EC2 servers which are VPS.

Also they are literally called OVHcloud...

Calling yourself a cloud doesn't make you one. Can you do auto scale groups with dynamically scaling load balancers yet on OVH? AWS has had that for 15 years now.
I dont think you realize how small scale majority of EU gov software has to be.

When you have country with population under 10mil and your gov form is used by 10% of those people a year… Thats 80k submissions a month, split by 20 workdays = 4k submissions a day over 8 work hours = 500 submissions hour or about 8 submissions a minute.

I know these are wrong numbers and there are peaks etc. But many would dare to put this on single server with sqlite. Even if you 10x that.

You do need autoscale groups or self healing architectures. Govs requirements are CRUD apps whos biggest issues are design, accessibility, data permissions etc. Not scale.

While the often advertised point of auto scaling is to handle some imagined large load, in reality it's used as a reliability principle.

For example, it enables seamless rollout strategies for frequent cicd. Any regressions in application performance are automatically handled by scaling up, etc.

> The cloud side isn't polished enough to pretend to be a cloud provider.

I mean, see Azure and Google Cloud a few years back. For quite a while the market was AWS, and also some joke services which nobody who wasn't required to used (notoriously, in 2012 Azure was substantially entirely down for _over a day_ due to a leap day).