Isn't OVH a budget hoster, especially compared to AWS? Are you compensating that somewhat on the engineering and high-availability side?
I work for a consultancy company that helps other companies set up cloud infrastructure and secure it. We have a lot of customers on a lot of different platforms, from all-in on AWS, Azure and GCP to smaller local cloud providers, and it's interesting to see the market evolve.
It's true that using some of the smaller cloud providers can save you about half, but you might need an experienced engineer to come up with solutions and an extra machine here and there to ensure availability, so the one-on-one cost is not that clear-cut. Lots of smaller companies go all in on e.g. AWS, but then their eggs are locked into one expensive basket, especially if you build your product on AWS-specific services that can't be moved easily elsewhere.
Hopsworks has a platform with a high-availability database (RonDB), a highly available distributed file system (HopsFS) and the services are also redundant. Hopsworks even supports failover to another region. So the software is very reliable. But given that, OVH is a proper cloud vendor and not only a budget hoster, so it has fault tolerant services as well. We use other European companies for budget hosting of our development systems.
> Isn't OVH a budget hoster, especially compared to AWS? Are you compensating that somewhat on the engineering and high-availability side?
The OVH control panel is probably the worst I've experienced out of all clouds. Random failures (resources not showing up), crashes, white pages, things not working or a lack of features that are considered "basic". It's also extremely slow.
I'd say at least 25% of my requests on it fail.
I recently had a cloud database completely freeze and lock up (including the replicas), no restart function is provided, so had to make a ticket to get it restarted.
Canuck here. We're considering getting off AWS and our exposure is mostly limited to EC2/RDS/S3. OVH has a bad rep in Canada from my limited experience, but it's always hard to tell what services folks were using and how and when.
Our biggest concern is a reliable replacement for RDS-postgres, which we've been using for about 13 years now and has been rock solid with the exception of a single, short period. Even then it was an update that caused high baseline CPU usage and AWS had it fixed in a few days.
Cost isn't the primary concern - though lower costs would be a nice side effect.
Shopping list:
- Good OpenTofu (or Terraform) support
- Reliable
- Good managed database (we could roll our own here if needed, I just don't wanna).
- Canadian DC
Nothing we do requires high performance or anything vendor specific. We also roll our own o11y and don't use AWS's vendor-specific solutions (at least not primarily).
I'm in the exact same boat (Canadian + same requirements). If you settle on something I would love to hear your experiences. While looking around I did find a Canadian provider:
I hadn't heard of FullHost, and I agree, something seems off with their offerings. The site is so noisy. This really stood out to me in their "DevOps Paas" database section: "An Innovative Approach to Clustered Databases".
Like, I totally understand marketing is marketing, but I don't want an innovative approach to foundational technologies. These are things that we know how to work and operate well. Now maybe I'm not their target market, but I want a careful, thoughtful approach.
Also, while I'm sure there are incredibly talented, smart people working at these more local hosting / cloud companies, please, please don't try to innovate with bread and butter services... just make it work, day in, day out. That's what I want. It's why we're still on AWS.
Anyway, I sent FullHost sales a little note with some questions. Will report back.
Indeed. But that doesn't solve the issue that OVH's reputation for their Canadian DCs isn't great from the (again limited) information I have. If we had heard consistently positive things, we'd be there (or strongly considering them). A few platform engineers I worked with had worked at OVH in Canada - again no stellar reports sadly.
If the numbers make sense, and you can afford the move, great!
Just ensure that you have backup plans for your backup. OVH had a fire (shit happens), but then actually lost data. I don't think that has ever happened at AWS.
The reliability of OVH has so far not been a problem. Performance is mostly a factor of the VM instances that you use, AWS has much more instances to choose from, but obviously at a much higher cost, so performance per dollar is obviously better with OVH.
> AWS S3 is the premier cloud-based object storage service. It may have higher availability, but it’s three times more expensive than OVH’s S3 storage.
One obvious benefit of OVH compared to Hetzner is the S3 storage, the Kubernetes framework and a number of other services provided by OVH, don't think Hetzner would provide those services.
The actual migration, a day or less. Now there was a 2-week sprint for testing and validating backup and restore before doing the actual migration. At the non-engineering level (management and such) of course there was a review and consideration time as well.
I'd also like to hear more detail (budget, time, people and skills) on
real cases.
When I had research students I set a few of them doing studies on
migration, degoogling, data "repatriation" (ick!) and all the things I
think we now call "sovereignty". But there was lots of theory and
precious few solid, documented studies. There were also hundreds of
propaganda pieces and Google/Microsoft/Amazon shill pieces sowing
disinfo.
Surely that's changed now and the economic realities are clearer?
We use OVH at my company too. They are pretty good and affordable.
My only complaint is that one day, they had an electrical problem on their datacenter and we were down for an entire day. We lost dozens of clients that day.
But this was 6 years ago, so a lot must have changed since then. And yes, I know we should have had a plan for when such things happen, but we didn't have one. Nowadays we have a different architecture with more than one cloud provider for redundancy, and it's cheaper than having everything on AWS.
After three years working with them, I think that AWS is an ok-ish business to work with... they are expensive, and things "mostly" work, and you start noticing all those other digits after the "99.999" or whatever of reliability that they market. But you (mostly) pay for what you use.
But they are the next economic recession waiting for Europe. It's my understanding that there is no legal basis any longer to transfer personally identifiable data to AWS servers. With the cooling of relations between USA and Europe, and the budding trade war, it's just a matter of time before cloud services become the next weapon. And huge European enterprises depend on American cloud businesses in hyper-critical ways.
I used OVH for personal projects but had to stop. They randomly block IPs from the iCloud Private Relay network, causing connection timeouts. Their SPF records for outgoing email services are incorrect and missing IP addresses. I opened a support ticket over a year ago, and it still hasn’t been resolved. (Obviously, I’ve moved my emails elsewhere because I’d like them to be delivered.)
Maybe their professional offerings are better. Never made me want to try though...
what made you choose for OVH instead of Scaleway.com ?
I recently discovered that Scaleway is also European, and that their offering is on par with many managed services AWS provides which could be a good drop-in replacement for them.
I'm curious too. I think OVH is ahead of Scaleway in the B2B market. For example in Italy you can only sell to the public sector if you have a local subsidiary passing a number of bureaucratic hurdles. OVH has one, Scaleway doesn't; so OVH seems to have gained about a hundred contracts, while Scaleway got only one years ago (though they're very small numbers in both cases; the Italian government is in the pocket of AWS/Azure/GCP/Oracle).
(Not OP) Scaleway is quite better at UI and has excellent support in my experience. OVH is a bit rougher but offers more solutions IMO, and has DCs in America (Scaleway is purely European).
Thank you for sharing! There's no excuse for staying on AWS (or Azure) these days, but it's hard to convince executives because the alternatives are marketed much less.
It’s also the pain AWS sales is pounding on IT teams that want to switch with a „too good to be true offer“ and some steak dinners with your c-suite later and you have to suffer through endless meetings with „specialists“ that are everything but.
There are lots of alternatives for database solutions with Kubernetes, in Hopsworks we use RonDB which is highly available and has a MySQL interface but also supports a REST API and even a prototype Redis service.
Theyve both done a really good job of following a similar vendor lock-in strategy to oracle as well as using their salespeople to scare the shit out of timid, risk averse execs over things like security and compliance.
This is how their market power was built - with FUD, lies and tricks. Theyve now gotten to the point where theyre comfortable enough with this market power that they can lean on it while pursuing a strategy of developer wage compression.
We use Hetzner internally for development. At the time of planning and migration Hetzner's Object Storage offering was not GA which was technically a deal breaker. Maybe we can consider Hetzner for our EU multi-cloud
> so we decided to migrate Hopsworks Serverless to OVHCloud - but we kept it in North America where most of our users are to maintain existing latency to those users.
So this has nothing to do with USA regime having access to data stored with USA companies. It’s just cost.
Isn't OVH a budget hoster, especially compared to AWS? Are you compensating that somewhat on the engineering and high-availability side?
I work for a consultancy company that helps other companies set up cloud infrastructure and secure it. We have a lot of customers on a lot of different platforms, from all-in on AWS, Azure and GCP to smaller local cloud providers, and it's interesting to see the market evolve.
It's true that using some of the smaller cloud providers can save you about half, but you might need an experienced engineer to come up with solutions and an extra machine here and there to ensure availability, so the one-on-one cost is not that clear-cut. Lots of smaller companies go all in on e.g. AWS, but then their eggs are locked into one expensive basket, especially if you build your product on AWS-specific services that can't be moved easily elsewhere.
Hopsworks has a platform with a high-availability database (RonDB), a highly available distributed file system (HopsFS) and the services are also redundant. Hopsworks even supports failover to another region. So the software is very reliable. But given that, OVH is a proper cloud vendor and not only a budget hoster, so it has fault tolerant services as well. We use other European companies for budget hosting of our development systems.
> Isn't OVH a budget hoster, especially compared to AWS? Are you compensating that somewhat on the engineering and high-availability side?
The OVH control panel is probably the worst I've experienced out of all clouds. Random failures (resources not showing up), crashes, white pages, things not working or a lack of features that are considered "basic". It's also extremely slow.
I'd say at least 25% of my requests on it fail.
I recently had a cloud database completely freeze and lock up (including the replicas), no restart function is provided, so had to make a ticket to get it restarted.
Can confirm, OVH is garbage. Lost my data multiple times. Luckily it was just random dev servers but I would NEVER EVER use them in production.
Stay away.
Wasn't the initial selling point of AWS to provide reliable and easy to use services using commodity hardware?
AWS was never commodity hardware. Perhaps you're thinking Google in the very early days.
Canuck here. We're considering getting off AWS and our exposure is mostly limited to EC2/RDS/S3. OVH has a bad rep in Canada from my limited experience, but it's always hard to tell what services folks were using and how and when.
Our biggest concern is a reliable replacement for RDS-postgres, which we've been using for about 13 years now and has been rock solid with the exception of a single, short period. Even then it was an update that caused high baseline CPU usage and AWS had it fixed in a few days.
Cost isn't the primary concern - though lower costs would be a nice side effect.
Shopping list:
- Good OpenTofu (or Terraform) support
- Reliable
- Good managed database (we could roll our own here if needed, I just don't wanna).
- Canadian DC
Nothing we do requires high performance or anything vendor specific. We also roll our own o11y and don't use AWS's vendor-specific solutions (at least not primarily).
I'm in the exact same boat (Canadian + same requirements). If you settle on something I would love to hear your experiences. While looking around I did find a Canadian provider:
https://www.fullhost.com/cloud-paas/
I'm intrigued but I'm also a little skeptical. They seem to do too much.
Will do!
I hadn't heard of FullHost, and I agree, something seems off with their offerings. The site is so noisy. This really stood out to me in their "DevOps Paas" database section: "An Innovative Approach to Clustered Databases".
Like, I totally understand marketing is marketing, but I don't want an innovative approach to foundational technologies. These are things that we know how to work and operate well. Now maybe I'm not their target market, but I want a careful, thoughtful approach.
Also, while I'm sure there are incredibly talented, smart people working at these more local hosting / cloud companies, please, please don't try to innovate with bread and butter services... just make it work, day in, day out. That's what I want. It's why we're still on AWS.
Anyway, I sent FullHost sales a little note with some questions. Will report back.
OVHCloud has a very decent support for automation - Terraform among others https://help.ovhcloud.com/csm/en-terraform-at-ovhcloud?id=kb...
Indeed. But that doesn't solve the issue that OVH's reputation for their Canadian DCs isn't great from the (again limited) information I have. If we had heard consistently positive things, we'd be there (or strongly considering them). A few platform engineers I worked with had worked at OVH in Canada - again no stellar reports sadly.
If the numbers make sense, and you can afford the move, great!
Just ensure that you have backup plans for your backup. OVH had a fire (shit happens), but then actually lost data. I don't think that has ever happened at AWS.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ovhcloud-ordered-...
Part of the team here - Happy to discuss this further if you have any question about the move.
Did you find differences in performance or reliability of the S3 and Kubernetes services already?
The reliability of OVH has so far not been a problem. Performance is mostly a factor of the VM instances that you use, AWS has much more instances to choose from, but obviously at a much higher cost, so performance per dollar is obviously better with OVH.
That's already answered in OP's article.
k8s:
> Good stability.
S3:
> AWS S3 is the premier cloud-based object storage service. It may have higher availability, but it’s three times more expensive than OVH’s S3 storage.
Any concrete plans to offer Serverless also in Europe?
We are already available in Europe; it is just our infrastructure that is currently more us-centric in that sense.
Eventually as the demand grows we will of course deploy in EU region to improve the availability.
If it is more of a sovereign aspect; we are deployable on kubernetes;one can already use our installer on OVHCloud and deploy on a European region.
Why OVH and not for instance Hetzner?
One obvious benefit of OVH compared to Hetzner is the S3 storage, the Kubernetes framework and a number of other services provided by OVH, don't think Hetzner would provide those services.
Hetzner has S3-like storage, https://www.hetzner.com/storage/object-storage/.
Hetzner's Object Storage does not seem API complete and it was released only recently.
How large was the total data transfer? It doesn't seem to have been that big.
You'd be surprised :) We had to migrate a few thousand projects and their feature data and users' custom images. It was substantial. (eng@Hopsworks)
How much time did it take from start to finish in terms of planning and preparing the entire operation?
The actual migration, a day or less. Now there was a 2-week sprint for testing and validating backup and restore before doing the actual migration. At the non-engineering level (management and such) of course there was a review and consideration time as well.
Good question.
I'd also like to hear more detail (budget, time, people and skills) on real cases.
When I had research students I set a few of them doing studies on migration, degoogling, data "repatriation" (ick!) and all the things I think we now call "sovereignty". But there was lots of theory and precious few solid, documented studies. There were also hundreds of propaganda pieces and Google/Microsoft/Amazon shill pieces sowing disinfo.
Surely that's changed now and the economic realities are clearer?
We use OVH at my company too. They are pretty good and affordable.
My only complaint is that one day, they had an electrical problem on their datacenter and we were down for an entire day. We lost dozens of clients that day.
But this was 6 years ago, so a lot must have changed since then. And yes, I know we should have had a plan for when such things happen, but we didn't have one. Nowadays we have a different architecture with more than one cloud provider for redundancy, and it's cheaper than having everything on AWS.
After three years working with them, I think that AWS is an ok-ish business to work with... they are expensive, and things "mostly" work, and you start noticing all those other digits after the "99.999" or whatever of reliability that they market. But you (mostly) pay for what you use.
But they are the next economic recession waiting for Europe. It's my understanding that there is no legal basis any longer to transfer personally identifiable data to AWS servers. With the cooling of relations between USA and Europe, and the budding trade war, it's just a matter of time before cloud services become the next weapon. And huge European enterprises depend on American cloud businesses in hyper-critical ways.
Totally. People ask what Hopsworks is - and I say "it is Databricks without data warehousing (just AI), and DJT can't turn it off on a whim".
Disclaimer: i work for Hopsworks
I used OVH for personal projects but had to stop. They randomly block IPs from the iCloud Private Relay network, causing connection timeouts. Their SPF records for outgoing email services are incorrect and missing IP addresses. I opened a support ticket over a year ago, and it still hasn’t been resolved. (Obviously, I’ve moved my emails elsewhere because I’d like them to be delivered.)
Maybe their professional offerings are better. Never made me want to try though...
As a USA-ian, I'd be happy with a US-based cloud, but not run by a spyware company (Amazon, Google, MS).
what made you choose for OVH instead of Scaleway.com ?
I recently discovered that Scaleway is also European, and that their offering is on par with many managed services AWS provides which could be a good drop-in replacement for them.
I'm curious too. I think OVH is ahead of Scaleway in the B2B market. For example in Italy you can only sell to the public sector if you have a local subsidiary passing a number of bureaucratic hurdles. OVH has one, Scaleway doesn't; so OVH seems to have gained about a hundred contracts, while Scaleway got only one years ago (though they're very small numbers in both cases; the Italian government is in the pocket of AWS/Azure/GCP/Oracle).
OVH is a public company.
Public vs private companies are day vs night when it comes to transparency.
Could you expand on this? How are they night and day?
(Not OP) Scaleway is quite better at UI and has excellent support in my experience. OVH is a bit rougher but offers more solutions IMO, and has DCs in America (Scaleway is purely European).
Thank you for sharing! There's no excuse for staying on AWS (or Azure) these days, but it's hard to convince executives because the alternatives are marketed much less.
It’s also the pain AWS sales is pounding on IT teams that want to switch with a „too good to be true offer“ and some steak dinners with your c-suite later and you have to suffer through endless meetings with „specialists“ that are everything but.
There are plenty of reasons to stay with AWS, RDS being one. Are there viable alternatives?
There are lots of alternatives for database solutions with Kubernetes, in Hopsworks we use RonDB which is highly available and has a MySQL interface but also supports a REST API and even a prototype Redis service.
I recently saw that Exascale, a Swiss provider, has something comparable, albeit afaik not autoscaling to the extent that Aurora is for example.
You are talking about Exoscale DBAAS, here: https://community.exoscale.com/community/dbaas/
(I work there.)
There's gazillion valid managed DB offers.
not cheaper than rds
First time I hear someone claim RDS is cheap. What specifications do you have in mind?
Scaleway costs approximately 51 % less, looking at on-demand postgresql instance with 8 GB RAM (db.t3.large vs. db-dev-l).
https://aws.amazon.com/rds/postgresql/pricing/?pg=pr&loc=3
https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/managed-databases/#cost-...
Theyve both done a really good job of following a similar vendor lock-in strategy to oracle as well as using their salespeople to scare the shit out of timid, risk averse execs over things like security and compliance.
This is how their market power was built - with FUD, lies and tricks. Theyve now gotten to the point where theyre comfortable enough with this market power that they can lean on it while pursuing a strategy of developer wage compression.
Somebody should tell them about Hetzner Cloud
We use Hetzner internally for development. At the time of planning and migration Hetzner's Object Storage offering was not GA which was technically a deal breaker. Maybe we can consider Hetzner for our EU multi-cloud
You could have used Cloudflare R2 for object storage and Hetzner for almost everything else.
Sure but as soon as you cross the boundaries of your provider both cost and latency start to ramp up ;)
> so we decided to migrate Hopsworks Serverless to OVHCloud - but we kept it in North America where most of our users are to maintain existing latency to those users.
So this has nothing to do with USA regime having access to data stored with USA companies. It’s just cost.
No, not nothing. As the boyscouts say - 'be prepared'.