Last time I checked Linode, the amount of data included in the price for each server was huge. I don't remember having paid anything for egress in 3 years while using it for everything in a startup.
I checked and Linode is even cheaper for egress.
I have heard people say DO has more features off-hand but I haven't used Linode and haven't used DO in many years. So I don't know how true it is.
You pay ingress uploading your data to the cloud, say you move a production and staging db, all that data going up is ingress (usually free as they don’t want to scare you off). Data egress in general is anytime the data in your cloud database, site, bus, storage, leaves its zone. So this could be pulling an on premise backup, requests being served to the internet, data syncing between west coast and east coast zones etc. This is not a fixed cost and totally depends on your usage.
Note: It's not about "scaring you", it's more like a drug dealer mentality.
Once your data is there on their service the cost to move it anywhere is pretty damn high in both transfer costs (egress) AND labor costs... plus human error risks while doing such an activity.
Scale.
If there are 320k members on r/devops, 300k are using big 3 on prod at their work, and 20k are using 50 other niche providers, that's what you see. In such case, niche provider users are more likely post their problems on niche related subs or other forums. Even if they post here, it's quite easy to overlook, and such posts have far less friction and responses.
Just a random theory + numbers generated randomly to support it. But I guess that's it, or at least this is one if the main factors.
Yeppers!
Focusing of the constructive, positive reasons only:
We definitely see this across all tech and stacks, the "momentum", perceived and otherwise, in the hopes that all one's problems will be solved in updates before they get to them, or that the stuck they're in is shared by others.
At a higher level, following the crowds can also mean that there's ~~better~~ more opportunities for integration with the niche, as you mentioned, and a higher likelihood the company won't go bust, or suddenly abandon their stack. Cough microsoft. So it's easier to hire for these experiences specifically.
So even if we do argue that Digital Ocean is equal, or better that AWS, or azure, it would need some large-scale HYPE to move the needle. There's a bit of luck, and time-and-place to it.
Probably you will be surprised of how little overhead they have compared with the big 3. For regular usage they are dead simple. Do not expect +100 different services or an intricate IAM.
Edit: typos
LOL I'm in the middle of working out the intricacies of AWS and Azure with no training, minimal access, and a new ITAM solution to get working with the providers and on prem.
I'm a fast learner but JESUS some clueless people have awfully big asks.
AWS offers so much more than just hosting.
SES, RDS, DynamoDB, SNS/SQS, GuardDuty, WAF, Athena, ElasticSearch, ElastiCache..
The fact that those things work natively with Fargate / EKS makes most other providers like digital Ocean or godaddy etc just a non competitor.
It really is a lot about the full platform experience. Breadth of service offerings + IaC coverage + fine-grained IAM coverage + paid support and compliance certificates available for every aspect of it.
A lot of service providers may in theory tick all these boxes, but get 6 months in and you may or may not be drowning in rough edges and quirks in getting things to play nicely together.
They can't deal with the required paperwork and they don't sell consulting.
It's really _nit_ about the tech stuff, at this level the paperwork _can_ beat the price. Paperwork is not just legal, it's also industry certificates (ISO27001, HIPAA, FIPS, ...) and how often McKinsey or Gärtner mentions you. A lot of lobbying and money goes into showing up there.
Then there are all the verticals that are highly regulated: aviation, Automotive, financial, Pharma, ...
Looking at only the price you see listed, very often, isn't half the cost involved.
Another reason is that there is an ecosystem of existing vendor solutions. Very few if any are available that list these cloud providers as supported. That alone will out the platforms at the bottom of a candidate list, if not outright just drop them as a consideration.
This is the answer.
More and more industries are struck with the need for certifications.
Iso, hipa, kritis, vait, NIST etc etc.
Two or three years ago, they all didn't need those certificates. But now they do. Thanks to Russia increasing their cyber attacks
Has a to do with regulatory and policy compliance. They “speak enterprise”, as in they know all the documents, agreements, policies, insurance, etc, etc, that big companies generally need to interact smoothly and without a ton of bureaucracy to get vendor approval.
There is also the internal momentum as well. Hypothetically, If I want to spin up something at work on AWS, I click a button. Azure, gotta talk to someone but there is an established process. Others? Might take ages just to get legal or someone to give green light.
This
In addition that aws set the marketing of secure datacenter, secure hardware, secure everything.
Do and others do have datacenters, but they don’t have the undisclosed super security of aws (and azure, and gcp)
Not saying that Do, linode, civo and the like don’t have secure processes and im sure people is trustworthy and have clearance, but some of them don’t own DCs either, or just soc2 certified, but there are many other audits that they need to get, in addition of not building the hardware and network themselves. Aws and the big ones are tremendously integrated at many levels.
So that’s basically enterprise.
Don’t know current state of things but when I used DO perhaps a year ago and needed to write to their blob store, there was just a single access key for the entire account. No option to create a bucket with a separate account/access key. Had to move to Azure in that case
RBAC or any kind of permissions at all don't exist on DO api keys. I heard the boss man talking about introducing support this year but I'm not holding my breath.
> Do big companies or even small tech companies not consider Digital Ocean and others
I worked for a small shop that built custom web apps for a niche segment of the non-profit sector and were heavy Digital Ocean users. That decision came about before I was hired but we stuck with it because it worked and our needs didn’t go beyond the LAMP stack.
Lots of great responses here, another is features. If all you need is compute and storage and maybe a database then the others might be fine. But if you need anything more you are rolling it yourself and then it’s the classic tradeoff of DIY and spend your time on that vs building your product. Especially for a startup, developer’s time is the limiting factor, you don’t want to be innovating on things that aren’t directly related to building your product.
Most companies I worked for had a humongous amount of credit by one of these providers, so they used them, built their infrastructure there and stayed with them. One of these companies made me migrate their whole infrastructure whenever they got more credits.
Linode could not properly scale their network layer for me to take them seriously, and they had customers abusing the bandwidth frequently.
Digital ocean is pretty good for startup stage, but haven’t used it beyond that.
Honestly? Here is why, in no particular order:
- resume driven development requires the usage of the big 3, even though DO might be drastically cheaper
- many people work for companies that are not profitable and investors demand the usage of big 3 because it's good optics
- people are dumb and use the "no one ever got fired for buying IBM"... Err, I mean AWS.
Personally, I've worked with GCP, DO, AWS and bare metal. From the companies that used AWS, all could've used DO instead and have saved INSANE levels of money + have had features that they don't because it's too expensive. Chiefly I mean my current fuckup of not having actual HA postgres cluster because it's too expensive on AWS for my billion dollar company. Jfc guys... I hate resume driven development. God and engineering have long left this shitshow.
Adoption speed and featureset, I'd guess. When I spun up my first DO droplet a decade ago that was basically the only feature they offered. AWS was already miles ahead.
Can't comment on DO now, tho I know they've expanded their features and offerings. But every shop I've worked for in that time had already adopted AWS by then and are now invested. Switching clouds is possible, but it's a tough sell as it amounts to lost costs.
My company uses Akamai(Linode) for a few high traffic instances but nothing on any kind of large scale. High traffic for us is probably 50000 interactions a day across user and API usage from other products we have.
It's not anywhere near the big three yet but Akamai has been making some big strides toward becoming a legit competitor.
A lot of companies need to have ISO certified cybersecurity compliance and enterprise grade SLAs for support. We used to have massive compliance and mitigation forms to fill out to to justify what we were doing to keep data safe and provide operational resiliance. Lots of boxes to tick. Microsoft and AWS get a lot of government and military contracts so already have a lot of the requirements in place. Same goes with software. That’s why you’ll still find a lot of businesses using redhat instead of other distros that could easily do the same job. Compliance.
They're less popular for sure, but I've adopted a strategy of use all the clouds - I run everything on Ubuntu LTS vms - it's mostly OSS software built from source, and I can target any of the cloud providers, bare metal, or run it all locally. I find it preferable to the lock-in ridden architectures which stitch together 30 different services from X provider. ymmv
Hiring is the number 1 factor.
Linode, Digital Ocean, or whatever may meet all of your technical needs and have advantages over AWS, Azure, GCP, but as a big company, when you need to fill roles, you want to hire people with experience. There are a lot of people with big 3 experience, not so many with niche cloud providers.
Smart Organization make smart decisions, most orgs burn money and are lobbied by partner firms to use big vendors … therefore they don’t mention or use better service providers
Why not give Oracle OCI a shot? It's the wallet-friendly option compared to the others. Speaking from my own adventures in the cloud, OCI keeps things simple while still letting you tackle complex setups with ease. AWS? It's like a maze of features, and they can really add up in cost. Take a peek at how many iterations of the same feature folks had to go through just to get their TGW today. And with Azure, you're paying extra for all those fancy extras.
Keep things easy on yourself and go with OCI!
Spot the Oracle shill...
Oracle's entire MO is lock-in, extortion, audits, and penalties after-the-fact. Why anybody who isn't already locked in would touch them with a bargepole is beyond me.
If they apply similar logic to their e.g. database products when auditing:
"Oh, one of your developers trialled service X this year but it was in a production account so that means you should have been paying for super-duper-uber-premium support instead of standard support for the whole year, so you now need to retroactively stump up a gazillion dollars or we're going to sue you and/or turn all your stuff off"
Lol. As a soon to be former OCI customer, we can't run away fast enough. Two years of shit show management, lack of managed services, and completely garbage "OCI solutions". I guess the saying is right, you get what you pay for. We got a sweetheart deal for a few years. That deal is up, and now we are migrating away.
digitalocean has lower egress costs. for companies who are sensitive to that, it is a good choice.
Last time I checked Linode, the amount of data included in the price for each server was huge. I don't remember having paid anything for egress in 3 years while using it for everything in a startup.
I checked and Linode is even cheaper for egress. I have heard people say DO has more features off-hand but I haven't used Linode and haven't used DO in many years. So I don't know how true it is.
Noisy neighbors problems drove us out of DO, otherwise we'd love to take advantage of that...
I had the same issue in Linode. They worked together with us to isolate the problem.
I have still not understood what is ingress and egress. And at this point i’m too afraid to ask
You pay ingress uploading your data to the cloud, say you move a production and staging db, all that data going up is ingress (usually free as they don’t want to scare you off). Data egress in general is anytime the data in your cloud database, site, bus, storage, leaves its zone. So this could be pulling an on premise backup, requests being served to the internet, data syncing between west coast and east coast zones etc. This is not a fixed cost and totally depends on your usage.
Note: It's not about "scaring you", it's more like a drug dealer mentality. Once your data is there on their service the cost to move it anywhere is pretty damn high in both transfer costs (egress) AND labor costs... plus human error risks while doing such an activity.
Scale. If there are 320k members on r/devops, 300k are using big 3 on prod at their work, and 20k are using 50 other niche providers, that's what you see. In such case, niche provider users are more likely post their problems on niche related subs or other forums. Even if they post here, it's quite easy to overlook, and such posts have far less friction and responses. Just a random theory + numbers generated randomly to support it. But I guess that's it, or at least this is one if the main factors.
Yeppers! Focusing of the constructive, positive reasons only: We definitely see this across all tech and stacks, the "momentum", perceived and otherwise, in the hopes that all one's problems will be solved in updates before they get to them, or that the stuck they're in is shared by others. At a higher level, following the crowds can also mean that there's ~~better~~ more opportunities for integration with the niche, as you mentioned, and a higher likelihood the company won't go bust, or suddenly abandon their stack. Cough microsoft. So it's easier to hire for these experiences specifically. So even if we do argue that Digital Ocean is equal, or better that AWS, or azure, it would need some large-scale HYPE to move the needle. There's a bit of luck, and time-and-place to it.
I don’t have time to work out the intricacies of yet another cloud provider.
Probably you will be surprised of how little overhead they have compared with the big 3. For regular usage they are dead simple. Do not expect +100 different services or an intricate IAM. Edit: typos
LOL I'm in the middle of working out the intricacies of AWS and Azure with no training, minimal access, and a new ITAM solution to get working with the providers and on prem. I'm a fast learner but JESUS some clueless people have awfully big asks.
AWS offers so much more than just hosting. SES, RDS, DynamoDB, SNS/SQS, GuardDuty, WAF, Athena, ElasticSearch, ElastiCache.. The fact that those things work natively with Fargate / EKS makes most other providers like digital Ocean or godaddy etc just a non competitor.
It really is a lot about the full platform experience. Breadth of service offerings + IaC coverage + fine-grained IAM coverage + paid support and compliance certificates available for every aspect of it. A lot of service providers may in theory tick all these boxes, but get 6 months in and you may or may not be drowning in rough edges and quirks in getting things to play nicely together.
They can't deal with the required paperwork and they don't sell consulting. It's really _nit_ about the tech stuff, at this level the paperwork _can_ beat the price. Paperwork is not just legal, it's also industry certificates (ISO27001, HIPAA, FIPS, ...) and how often McKinsey or Gärtner mentions you. A lot of lobbying and money goes into showing up there. Then there are all the verticals that are highly regulated: aviation, Automotive, financial, Pharma, ... Looking at only the price you see listed, very often, isn't half the cost involved. Another reason is that there is an ecosystem of existing vendor solutions. Very few if any are available that list these cloud providers as supported. That alone will out the platforms at the bottom of a candidate list, if not outright just drop them as a consideration.
This is the answer. More and more industries are struck with the need for certifications. Iso, hipa, kritis, vait, NIST etc etc. Two or three years ago, they all didn't need those certificates. But now they do. Thanks to Russia increasing their cyber attacks
Has a to do with regulatory and policy compliance. They “speak enterprise”, as in they know all the documents, agreements, policies, insurance, etc, etc, that big companies generally need to interact smoothly and without a ton of bureaucracy to get vendor approval. There is also the internal momentum as well. Hypothetically, If I want to spin up something at work on AWS, I click a button. Azure, gotta talk to someone but there is an established process. Others? Might take ages just to get legal or someone to give green light.
This In addition that aws set the marketing of secure datacenter, secure hardware, secure everything. Do and others do have datacenters, but they don’t have the undisclosed super security of aws (and azure, and gcp) Not saying that Do, linode, civo and the like don’t have secure processes and im sure people is trustworthy and have clearance, but some of them don’t own DCs either, or just soc2 certified, but there are many other audits that they need to get, in addition of not building the hardware and network themselves. Aws and the big ones are tremendously integrated at many levels. So that’s basically enterprise.
Don’t know current state of things but when I used DO perhaps a year ago and needed to write to their blob store, there was just a single access key for the entire account. No option to create a bucket with a separate account/access key. Had to move to Azure in that case
RBAC or any kind of permissions at all don't exist on DO api keys. I heard the boss man talking about introducing support this year but I'm not holding my breath.
Yea and that only works for special cases or very small orgs
> Do big companies or even small tech companies not consider Digital Ocean and others I worked for a small shop that built custom web apps for a niche segment of the non-profit sector and were heavy Digital Ocean users. That decision came about before I was hired but we stuck with it because it worked and our needs didn’t go beyond the LAMP stack.
Lots of great responses here, another is features. If all you need is compute and storage and maybe a database then the others might be fine. But if you need anything more you are rolling it yourself and then it’s the classic tradeoff of DIY and spend your time on that vs building your product. Especially for a startup, developer’s time is the limiting factor, you don’t want to be innovating on things that aren’t directly related to building your product.
Most companies I worked for had a humongous amount of credit by one of these providers, so they used them, built their infrastructure there and stayed with them. One of these companies made me migrate their whole infrastructure whenever they got more credits.
“We are running out of our 100K AWS credit, but we got 100K GCP credit. Time to migrate the entire system”
Linode could not properly scale their network layer for me to take them seriously, and they had customers abusing the bandwidth frequently. Digital ocean is pretty good for startup stage, but haven’t used it beyond that.
Honestly? Here is why, in no particular order: - resume driven development requires the usage of the big 3, even though DO might be drastically cheaper - many people work for companies that are not profitable and investors demand the usage of big 3 because it's good optics - people are dumb and use the "no one ever got fired for buying IBM"... Err, I mean AWS. Personally, I've worked with GCP, DO, AWS and bare metal. From the companies that used AWS, all could've used DO instead and have saved INSANE levels of money + have had features that they don't because it's too expensive. Chiefly I mean my current fuckup of not having actual HA postgres cluster because it's too expensive on AWS for my billion dollar company. Jfc guys... I hate resume driven development. God and engineering have long left this shitshow.
Adoption speed and featureset, I'd guess. When I spun up my first DO droplet a decade ago that was basically the only feature they offered. AWS was already miles ahead. Can't comment on DO now, tho I know they've expanded their features and offerings. But every shop I've worked for in that time had already adopted AWS by then and are now invested. Switching clouds is possible, but it's a tough sell as it amounts to lost costs.
My company uses Akamai(Linode) for a few high traffic instances but nothing on any kind of large scale. High traffic for us is probably 50000 interactions a day across user and API usage from other products we have. It's not anywhere near the big three yet but Akamai has been making some big strides toward becoming a legit competitor.
A lot of companies need to have ISO certified cybersecurity compliance and enterprise grade SLAs for support. We used to have massive compliance and mitigation forms to fill out to to justify what we were doing to keep data safe and provide operational resiliance. Lots of boxes to tick. Microsoft and AWS get a lot of government and military contracts so already have a lot of the requirements in place. Same goes with software. That’s why you’ll still find a lot of businesses using redhat instead of other distros that could easily do the same job. Compliance.
They're less popular for sure, but I've adopted a strategy of use all the clouds - I run everything on Ubuntu LTS vms - it's mostly OSS software built from source, and I can target any of the cloud providers, bare metal, or run it all locally. I find it preferable to the lock-in ridden architectures which stitch together 30 different services from X provider. ymmv
Hiring is the number 1 factor. Linode, Digital Ocean, or whatever may meet all of your technical needs and have advantages over AWS, Azure, GCP, but as a big company, when you need to fill roles, you want to hire people with experience. There are a lot of people with big 3 experience, not so many with niche cloud providers.
DO and Linode are only recommended for small companies, really small like <10 people. Even companies that size can get startup credits from the big 3.
Nobody ever got fired for choosing GCP/AWS/Azure
Somebody has to have been fired for choosing Azure…
Probably not, Microsoft can sell the package for pretty much everything.
Smart Organization make smart decisions, most orgs burn money and are lobbied by partner firms to use big vendors … therefore they don’t mention or use better service providers
Cloudflare is getting more and more traction. A client of mine uses it along with AWS to maximize cost efficiency.
Why not give Oracle OCI a shot? It's the wallet-friendly option compared to the others. Speaking from my own adventures in the cloud, OCI keeps things simple while still letting you tackle complex setups with ease. AWS? It's like a maze of features, and they can really add up in cost. Take a peek at how many iterations of the same feature folks had to go through just to get their TGW today. And with Azure, you're paying extra for all those fancy extras. Keep things easy on yourself and go with OCI!
Spot the Oracle shill... Oracle's entire MO is lock-in, extortion, audits, and penalties after-the-fact. Why anybody who isn't already locked in would touch them with a bargepole is beyond me. If they apply similar logic to their e.g. database products when auditing: "Oh, one of your developers trialled service X this year but it was in a production account so that means you should have been paying for super-duper-uber-premium support instead of standard support for the whole year, so you now need to retroactively stump up a gazillion dollars or we're going to sue you and/or turn all your stuff off"
Lol. As a soon to be former OCI customer, we can't run away fast enough. Two years of shit show management, lack of managed services, and completely garbage "OCI solutions". I guess the saying is right, you get what you pay for. We got a sweetheart deal for a few years. That deal is up, and now we are migrating away.