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Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

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Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#211

Post by dijit »

TrickardRixx wrote: post #75
lolinder wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Really, I can't see a compelling reason to be in the cloud for the majority of mid-level workloads like ours. I work on a very small team. We have a few developers who double as ops. None of us are or want to be sysadmins. For our case, Amazon's ECS is a massive time and money saver. I spent a week or two a few years ago getting all of our services containerized. Since then we have not had a single full production…

Very similar experience here. I work on a two person "DevOps" team. Without AWS ECS we would have to have a much higher headcount. I get to spend most of my time solving real problems for the engineers on the product team rather than sysadmin work.

What are “real problems” for the engineers or product team?

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#212

Post by wirelesspotat »

I migrated a previous company's infrastructure from AWS to Fly.io

Our AWS bill was the main reason. It was far higher than it should have been for the traffic we were serving. Even after we'd halved our AWS bill (the original bills had been crazy), it was still kinda high

Fly was a pretty clear choice when we looked at the lower costs and ease of transitioning from single-region to multi-region infrastructure

I'd been nudging the CEO about doing a migration for about a year before we decided to make the move. When I found that I couldn't really get our AWS costs any lower and did a full cost estimate of Fly vs AWS, the wheels moved reasonably quickly

The CEO primarily cared about lowering our monthly costs and being able to do the migration reasonably quickly (~1 month)

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#213

Post by johnthescott »

withinboredom wrote: post #122
sruffatti wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bump! This sounds very interesting.

Highly recommend WireGuard for this (see kilo for k8s specific that works with whatever network you have setup). Setting up a VPN that just works is super simple.

yep, wireguard is the secret for intercloud, for sure.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#214

Post by orware »

k8sToGo wrote: post #172
YorickPeterse wrote: post #117

At GitLab we went from AWS to Azure, then to Google Cloud (this was a few years ago). AWS was what we started with, and I think like most companies very little attention was paid to the costs, setup, etc. The result was that we were basically setting money on fire. I think at some point Azure announced $X in free credits for YC members, and GitLab determined this would save us something like a year's worth in bills (…

I wish Hetzner provided RDS

It's still a bit early for the company but if you like RDS, PlanetScale might be worth a look too: https://planetscale.com/

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#215

Post by tinco »

vidarh wrote: post #40

Yes. I once did zero downtime migration first from AWS to Google, then from Google to Hetzner for a client. Mostly for cost reasons: they had a lot of free credits, and moved to Hetzner when they ran out. Their savings from using the credits were at least 20x what the migrations cost. We did the migration by having reverse proxies in each environment that could proxy to backends each place, set up a VPN between them,…

At my previous job we ran a bare metal cluster at Hetzner, and monitoring the hardware was quite an intensive task. Always monitoring hard drives network bottlenecks, CPU usage, etc. This was before K8s, so it might not be comparable to today.

Would you say bare metal cost a lot of extra monitoring/maintenance, or is this something you did on the cloud hardware as well anyway? Do you run virtualization on the Hetzner machines?

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#216

Post by drusepth »

I switched from Heroku to AWS, then eventually back to Heroku. Heroku to AWS was for cost reasons (cut monthly costs by roughly 35%) but wasn't enough savings to justify hiring a devops person. As soon as there were too many issues I didn't know how to fix (setting up everything Heroku offers was hard and likely done wrong, which made ongoing maintenance some level of hell), I switched back to Heroku where the lack of devops needs basically paid for itself.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#217

Post by dijit »

bushbaba wrote: post #171
yonixw wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct, But as I understand, They get "RAW" file access to the S3 hard disk (or the equivalent) in their solution. So no matter what solution I might spawn, it will always be slower and more expensive. Maybe I should have said "closed internal access features"

Doubtful. I've personally had projects pull many hundreds of gigabits per second of s3 throughput. How you architect and design has a large influence to your analytics performance.

“Many hundreds”

Last time I talked to a technical person at AWS the limit was 5GBits. Wonder what you’re doing differently.

Perhaps that changed.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#218

Post by teh_klev »

vidarh wrote: post #40

Yes. I once did zero downtime migration first from AWS to Google, then from Google to Hetzner for a client. Mostly for cost reasons: they had a lot of free credits, and moved to Hetzner when they ran out. Their savings from using the credits were at least 20x what the migrations cost. We did the migration by having reverse proxies in each environment that could proxy to backends each place, set up a VPN between them,…

I hate to be the bean counter, but what was the true cost ultimately? As you and your team's cost as resources.

It's nice that you ended up with a provider agnostic capability to deploy anywhere, but none of that was free in terms of ownership costs to get there.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#219

Post by hardwaresofton »

tinco wrote: post #215
vidarh wrote: post #40

Yes. I once did zero downtime migration first from AWS to Google, then from Google to Hetzner for a client. Mostly for cost reasons: they had a lot of free credits, and moved to Hetzner when they ran out. Their savings from using the credits were at least 20x what the migrations cost. We did the migration by having reverse proxies in each environment that could proxy to backends each place, set up a VPN between them,…

At my previous job we ran a bare metal cluster at Hetzner, and monitoring the hardware was quite an intensive task. Always monitoring hard drives network bottlenecks, CPU usage, etc. This was before K8s, so it might not be comparable to today. Would you say bare metal cost a lot of extra monitoring/maintenance, or is this something you did on the cloud hardware as well anyway? Do you run virtualization on the Hetzner…

Just a note, there are some companies that have been popping up recently to try to bridge the gap for services on clouds like Hetzner.

https://elest.io

https://nimbusws.com (I'm building this one so I'm biased for it).

> Would you say bare metal cost a lot of extra monitoring/maintenance, or is this something you did on the cloud hardware as well anyway? Do you run virtualization on the Hetzner machines?

It cost a lot of monitoring/maintenance up front, but once things are purring the costs amortize really well. Hetzner has the occasional hard drive failure[0], but you should be running in a RAIDed setup (that's the default for Hetzner-installed OSes), so you do have some time. They also replace drives very quickly.

If you really want to remove this headache, you run something like Ceph and make sure data copies are properly replicated to multiple hosts and you'll be fine if two drives on a single host die at the same time. Obviously nothing is every that easy but I know that I spend pretty much no time thinking about it these days.

I run a Kubernetes cluster and most of my downtime/outages have been self-inflicted, I'm wonderfully happy with my cluster now. Also another thing to note is that control plane downtime != workload downtime, which is another nice thing -- and you can hook up grafana etc to monitor it all.

[0]: https://vadosware.io/post/handling-your-first-dead-hetzner-h...

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?

#220

Post by kebsup »

moooo99 wrote: post #116
Nextgrid wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cloud has normalized terrible underpowered VMs, so many new developers may just not be aware of how much performance a real dedicated machine has - even a relatively "mid range" one (i7 & 16 GB RAM).

This! I benchmarked a whole bunch of different cloud providers for fun (& my bachelor thesis) and was impressed by how bad some cloud VPS perform. Considering the really steep price to get any kind of significant memory/CPU resources with the major cloud providers as well as the steep bandwidth charges this little experiment was eye opening

I'd be interested as well.
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