Smaller clouds provide outstanding value

How the cloud enables us to build without worry

As we all know, using a cloud allows for more time building out the business logic instead of worrying about infrastructure. Dedicated systems engineers, DevOps available 24/7 in case of a hardware or software outage due to mis-configuration or pure randomness and having to rent out infrastructure cost real time and money. Time and money better spent on growing the product itself. Cloud provides convenience, ease of use, scalability and reliability, but not all clouds are equal.

The big players

We all have heard of AWS, Azure and GCP and how they allow you to scale from 0 to virtually unlimited capacity within minutes without the press of a button. It sounds utopian in theory, but the harsh reality is that these clouds charge exorbitant fees for the most basic of services, one of them being outgoing data transfer. These bandwidth charges have the ability to eat up a huge slice of your budget without you noticing immediately.

In our experience, these fees can go out of control very quickly, for instance, a GCP MySQL instance that cost 7$ a month quickly accrued egress fees of 60$+ per month when connected to an on-premise service.

The big players want you to put all your eggs in their basket so that they can charge you even more hidden and explicit fees for services such as load balancing (with an extra cost per GB processed), NAT, container registries and let’s not forget their proprietary serverless systems that promise low cost but instantly become money pits the instant you see any real usage. And you still have to eventually pay data egress charges for your projects.

What we cannot criticize the big players for, is their top reliability and SLA. It is completely expected for the amounts they charge.

Make yourself cloud-agnostic

You should always make your architecture provider agnostic. Docker (and Kubernetes for larger projects) are somewhat decoupled from the cloud you are using. Sure, k8s (Kubernetes) will depend on cloud-specific configuration for things such as volumes and ingresses, but you can always jump ship and leave the helm when the provider decides that they should bump their prices.

We want to be on the cloud, but not be controlled by the prices

That’s where smaller players come into the market. 99% of websites and apps do not require an event bus, distributed systems and expensive proprietary databases. You can make due with docker containers, PostgreSQL and Redis (for larger projects). There are a few providers like DigitalOcean that provide outstanding value, especially for smaller projects, but still allow you to grow at scale without experiencing issues.

They charge only 10$ per TB of data as compared to the big players which range from 60-120$ per TB excluding extra fees for load balancers and such. They also provide Kubernetes and serverless functions (of which I discourage the use), but you could also just create a big VM and install HashiCorp Nomad and orchestrate like a pro.

Click on the image below to try DigitalOcean out! (affiliate link):

How do I build cloud-agnostic software?

The trick is to simply minimize the use of fancy services such as serverless and event queues, chances are, you probably don’t need them and never will. Spawning a 5$ a month VM running Portainer (a docker host GUI). Docker can run your database and you can store files on S3 compatible buckets such as Cloudflare R2 free tier or DigitalOcean’s own S3 compatible buckets (note that they cost a minimum of 5$ a month).

If you need no downtime deployments, just use Nomad or Kubernetes, both have a smooth enough learning curve that you can build scalable systems (not microservices) without giving yourself problems.

Conclusion

Make a product that works without relying on cloud providers’ proprietary services, build horizontally scalable monoliths, keep the system as simple as possible (KISS) and use a cloud that doesn’t charge much for data transfer such as DigitalOcean, Linode or Scaleway. I would still recommend the first due to their more mature catalog of products. (It also helps us financially).

Thanks a lot for reading and I hope this gave a clearer picture of the state of the cloud.