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We cut costs by 70% by moving from GCP and CockroachDB to Hetzner and PostgreSQL

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Re: We cut costs by 70% by moving from GCP and CockroachDB to Hetzner and PostgreSQL

#41

Post by jauntywundrkind »

jitl wrote: post #9
threeseed wrote: post #3

Not really. You didn't factor in the time it takes to manage k3s yourself versus GKE which is managed.

Self management could be expensive if it’s actually going to burn hours of dev time. At teensy scale is k3s really gonna take much “management” after the bring-up? I don’t think so. For a teensy team, it seems totally worth it to take a runway from 12 months to 40 months for the price of a few afternoon’s work.

The wins here are absurd, & the resistance to them remains as staunchly resolutely inconsiderate as ever.

I've done Lets Encrypt by hand. I've had rotation not work as expected. I've done postgres by hand. I've spent work weeks setting up and testing backups. I've dealt with fallout from another person's backups scripts not working. I've worked with teams that took weeks to setup replicas. I've been on teams that have spent quarters building and improving ci/cd systems.

Folks will never ever shut up about how you might not need Kubernetes, but damn this post documented an extremely short path through a couple kind of annoying to DIY things that just bloody work and at a much much much higher level of productization than the bullshit bespoke scripts your own team would put together.

Traeffik load balancer with l7 routing? Already running. Let's Encrypt? Works, reliably. Internal DNS? Out of the box. Postgres? Incredibly well managed. Ci/cd? A nearly Heroku like beautiful world of gitops. These pieces all snap in to the general framing with ease & grace; this whole post is a complete DIY infrastructure stack that one could do in an afternoon, and even better the output is predictable & understandable & legible by another practitioner, which the "real men just do it themselves" attitude doesn't cover.

The bullshit asymetry principle feels soooo strong here. Spreading fear uncertainty & doubt, yucking people's yum, is going to waste an incredible amount of time.

Re: We cut costs by 70% by moving from GCP and CockroachDB to Hetzner and PostgreSQL

#44

Post by rbtprograms »

tayo42 wrote: post #15

I should write a blog about how I saved the same amount in absolute terms by turning off the stuff i forgot is running in the cloud. Side note: the anime girls all over is kind strange. Like the header is giant cartoon tits? Why?

Yea, the obivously AI-generated big-titty anime woman header was super out of place.

Re: We cut costs by 70% by moving from GCP and CockroachDB to Hetzner and PostgreSQL

#45

Post by beoberha »

JB_Dev wrote: post #24

The time investment here doesn’t really make sense to me. That 70% savings was actually only $33 a month. Was it really worth spending that dev time and effort for such a small return rather than the product itself? And yea now you get to manage your own cluster… thats an ongoing cost too, not free.

Yeah feels a bit disingenuous to title the article “70%”. While correct, it elicits the thought of a much more interesting migration than what actually happened.

Re: We cut costs by 70% by moving from GCP and CockroachDB to Hetzner and PostgreSQL

#46

Post by mycentstoo »

secondcoming wrote: post #37
mycentstoo wrote: post #21

As an SRE who’s moved between a few companies recently, I’ve noticed a trend towards simpler infrastructure options rather than k8s. Most places I interviewed at used AWS with just fleets of EC2s managed through ASG and instance refresh. Deployments are no downtime. It’s pretty nice and if you want to run with docker on the host instances you can but you can also just install the application using systemd.

This is what we do for GCE. Our CI builds a system image and then that's deployed across our datacentres. Worked perfectly for years, but still people want to switch to kubernetes. What can you do?

Oh definitely that happens and from my experience I don’t think there’s a lot that can be done unless there’s strong faith in engineering leadership to push back on the complexity.

Re: We cut costs by 70% by moving from GCP and CockroachDB to Hetzner and PostgreSQL

#47

Post by motoxpro »

JB_Dev wrote: post #24

The time investment here doesn’t really make sense to me. That 70% savings was actually only $33 a month. Was it really worth spending that dev time and effort for such a small return rather than the product itself? And yea now you get to manage your own cluster… thats an ongoing cost too, not free.

This is what I always think. People will spend $10,000 on engineering time (2 engineers working ~1.5 weeks) to save $500, that then turns into a COST later because they have to spend more on maintenance.

Re: We cut costs by 70% by moving from GCP and CockroachDB to Hetzner and PostgreSQL

#48

Post by lyu07282 »

jitl wrote: post #4

48.08 USD per month on a single-node GKE cluster w/ 2 cores 4 gigs -> 15.34 USD per month Hetzner VPS w/ 4 cores 8 gigs.

48 seems really low to me, I've never seen a k8s cloud cluster for less then 100-150 a month on the very low end, also doesn't take egress into account

how do you even run a k8s cluster "on 2 cores 4 gigs", don't you need at least 3 nodes?

Re: We cut costs by 70% by moving from GCP and CockroachDB to Hetzner and PostgreSQL

#49

Post by jauntywundrkind »

mycentstoo wrote: post #21

As an SRE who’s moved between a few companies recently, I’ve noticed a trend towards simpler infrastructure options rather than k8s. Most places I interviewed at used AWS with just fleets of EC2s managed through ASG and instance refresh. Deployments are no downtime. It’s pretty nice and if you want to run with docker on the host instances you can but you can also just install the application using systemd.

How do you build ec2's? Funny thing is, everyone will have their own answer. Few will look alike. It's maybe simpler, but also bespoke.

There's different definitions of simpler. I've rarely felt like folk's have a great grasp when they cobble together a bunch of options. Things that maybe one engineer started as a simple project 5 years ago grow and sprawl. They rarely stay simple.

What this team gets out of the box here is not to be trivialized. You havent started talking to the ci/cd that ArgoCD deploys. How are load balancers setup & managed, and at what price (Traeffik here is basically free)? Well managed Postgres with backups & replication, Lets Encrypt... handled. Is it really simpler to keep DIY'ing bits and bobs? Are you confident your simple start will work reliably & won't need improvement? What is better about your pile "simple" bespoke solutions, and why not have a platform that integrates varying concerns with consistent management patterns & autonomic operators?

Re: We cut costs by 70% by moving from GCP and CockroachDB to Hetzner and PostgreSQL

#50

Post by windexh8er »

paxys wrote: post #7

It's wild to me that we are talking about a site running on a single 2 core VPS costing $15/mo and the developer didn't stop to consider that maybe they don't need Kubernetes for this. Like...just run your damn services on the box like we've been doing since web hosting first became a thing.

I've said it a few times before: k8s is such a distraction for so many startups I've been in (~5). All of them fall into the same trap: write entire arch around k8s and then not really invest the engineering into building it out fully. Instead they all seemed to settle on "hey this works" which kicks off the technical debt receipt printing.

In all of them fixing things often went like this... * A: XYZ is broke. * B: OK, is the pod running? * A: Yeah. * B: Did you try killing it? That usually fixes the problem.

It's madness k8s is generally always the root cause of the problem because of resource constraints, node issues, a misunderstanding of H/V scaling, and the list seems to just go on.

At this point I feel like k8s is the c4r (cancer) of a lot of startups that would be better off just running in a more traditional VM / container strategy and dealing with growing pains if and when they become apparent. Also, it's almost guaranteed to cost less. Kaa$ is a racket.

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