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AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

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Re: AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

#31

Post by xyzzy123 »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #27
jasode wrote: post #19

>While AWS and Azure are industry leaders, their advantages often only materialize at massive scales. [...] Your comparisons are similar to many others out there that focus on measuring basic cpu and memory. This type of easy comparison where AWS/Azure/GCP is treated as a "dumb" datacenter is easy for alternatives like Hetzner or self-hosting to "win". >Do you really need the advanced features of AWS and Azure right…

Unfortunately, it's a false dichotomy you present, it's not a binary choice of fully managed or entirely roll your own. E.g., if you're running K8s (one thing I typically recommend you buy a managed one of), you can install your own Kafka in it, using an operator that does about 85% of what MSK does. Sure, you'll need to dedicate person hours to support the operator, but is supporting that any more expensive than sup…

It's also, what kind of startup are you? What kind of workload do you have?

If you are bootstrapping a crud app business then 1 beefy hetzner box (or something slightly more reliable) with postgresql is probably fine until you reach scale where you sell the business. You care about burn rate above all.

If you are VC backed go all in on gcp or aws because thats what you're expected to do and and what the expensive people you hire are going to know.

Re: AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

#32

Post by redserk »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #27
jasode wrote: post #19

>While AWS and Azure are industry leaders, their advantages often only materialize at massive scales. [...] Your comparisons are similar to many others out there that focus on measuring basic cpu and memory. This type of easy comparison where AWS/Azure/GCP is treated as a "dumb" datacenter is easy for alternatives like Hetzner or self-hosting to "win". >Do you really need the advanced features of AWS and Azure right…

Unfortunately, it's a false dichotomy you present, it's not a binary choice of fully managed or entirely roll your own. E.g., if you're running K8s (one thing I typically recommend you buy a managed one of), you can install your own Kafka in it, using an operator that does about 85% of what MSK does. Sure, you'll need to dedicate person hours to support the operator, but is supporting that any more expensive than sup…

You can open a ticket and make the weirdest of issues with MSK Amazon’s problem to deal with.

Same with RDS, etc.

It’s pretty great not to waste time when the lottery for the bizarrest of 0.000001% issues arise.

The operator only solves the happy path. An AWS support ticket usually can solve the unhappy path.

Re: AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

#33

Post by E_Bfx »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #17

On GCP and Azure, most folks would be better off running serverless containers via Cloud Run or Container Apps (AWS has no direct equivalent that scales to 0 and incurs no cost). Both of these scale to zero and offer 180k vCPU/s free per month, 360k GB/s free per month. You incur billing only against the active execution time. Cloud Run Jobs has a whole separate free monthly grant as well. You can run A LOT for free…

Thanks a lot,

Most people think it is easier to use EC2 than FarGate since the first is the most famous one. But actually, it is the other way around!

Re: AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

#34

Post by obenn »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #28
obenn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AWS equivalent to Cloud Run and Container Apps is called Fargate, https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/

Neither Fargate nor App Runner scale to zero (unless something changed). So there is always a baseline cost of a few dollars.

Lambda container would be the closest equivalent with that functionality, https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/images-create.h...

Re: AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

#35

Post by deadbunny »

nik736 wrote: post #9
jabwd wrote: post #4

The offering from Hetzner I find especially appealing are the consumer grade hardware ones. No I wouldn't host business critical services on one, but I don't have those so easy win for me price wise.

Why not? It's ECC RAM and a server grade motherboard. The only downside is 1 PSU, but you can buy 10x the amount of servers compared to AWS :-)

They're running ECC on consumer level Intel chips?

Re: AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

#36

Post by EdwardDiego »

redserk wrote: post #32
EdwardDiego wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, it's a false dichotomy you present, it's not a binary choice of fully managed or entirely roll your own. E.g., if you're running K8s (one thing I typically recommend you buy a managed one of), you can install your own Kafka in it, using an operator that does about 85% of what MSK does. Sure, you'll need to dedicate person hours to support the operator, but is supporting that any more expensive than sup…

You can open a ticket and make the weirdest of issues with MSK Amazon’s problem to deal with. Same with RDS, etc. It’s pretty great not to waste time when the lottery for the bizarrest of 0.000001% issues arise. The operator only solves the happy path. An AWS support ticket usually can solve the unhappy path.

Sure, but you can also go to a Slack channel and get help from the people who wrote the FOSS code you're using.

For free.

Yep, if your Kafka is mission critical and crashes hard, that is bad.

But things like Kafka are _never_ a black box you just spin up and never worry about, if anyone thinks so, CAP theorem will give them an awful surprise one day.

You're always going to need someone in your team who understands the tech and how to make best use of it.

MSK won't tell you how many partitions your topic needs, or whether your retention strategy should be delete, or compact, or both.

You still need that knowledge of the "managed" service to make effective use of it.

And that knowledge sits rather close to knowledge of how the system works, so given you'll need that knowledge anyway, may as well cultivate it instead.

Oh, and the operators also solve a lot of the unhappy paths too, FYI.

I tend to describe the operator approach as "half-managed" because things like multiple-AZ stretch clusters need some configuration.

But then, maybe you didn't want a 3-AZ cluster? Maybe a 2.5? MSK says no.

Re: AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

#38

Post by CPLX »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #36
redserk wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can open a ticket and make the weirdest of issues with MSK Amazon’s problem to deal with. Same with RDS, etc. It’s pretty great not to waste time when the lottery for the bizarrest of 0.000001% issues arise. The operator only solves the happy path. An AWS support ticket usually can solve the unhappy path.

Sure, but you can also go to a Slack channel and get help from the people who wrote the FOSS code you're using. For free. Yep, if your Kafka is mission critical and crashes hard, that is bad. But things like Kafka are _never_ a black box you just spin up and never worry about, if anyone thinks so, CAP theorem will give them an awful surprise one day. You're always going to need someone in your team who understands th…

> For free

Not sure we agree on the meaning of this phrase in this context.

Re: AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

#39

Post by [deleted] »

obenn wrote: post #26
CharlieDigital wrote: post #17

On GCP and Azure, most folks would be better off running serverless containers via Cloud Run or Container Apps (AWS has no direct equivalent that scales to 0 and incurs no cost). Both of these scale to zero and offer 180k vCPU/s free per month, 360k GB/s free per month. You incur billing only against the active execution time. Cloud Run Jobs has a whole separate free monthly grant as well. You can run A LOT for free…

The AWS equivalent to Cloud Run and Container Apps is called Fargate, https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/

[deleted]
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