AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by sgarland » Mon, Oct 21, 2024, 3:24 PM UTC

nijave wrote: post #98

sgarland wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends if you want to pay more in money(a lot more) indefinitely, or pay more in time up front to set up automation. If you have immutable images, I don’t see how there is much difference at all. There are many container orchestrators available.

All these "VMs are sooo much cheaper" articles are always pricing bare VMs. It'd be more useful if someone actually calculated Total Cost of Ownership for a completed solution. You likely also need to price in load balancers, database servers, DNS, backups, access management, monitoring to get a fair quote and a meaningful comparison if you actually plan to run a real application

> load balancers

These also run on VMs.

> database servers

These also run on VMs.

> DNS

This is such a tiny cost that it’s not worth mentioning at any scale.

> Backups

This can go any number of ways, with price tags all over the place, yes.

> Access management

There are plenty of free and paid solutions available.

> Monitoring

See Backups.

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

#112

Post by sgarland » Mon, Oct 21, 2024, 3:34 PM UTC

redserk wrote: post #105

sgarland wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're always going to need someone in your team who understands the tech and how to make best 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. This has been my argument forever, and it’s always met with disagreement, because entirely too many people have no desire to learn their tooling. They just…

Or hold off on the academic-style pretentiousness and come back down to the real world. At some point, we have to decide that there's a lot of knowledge expectations depending on your stack, especially as parts of your application grows. Say you're a Python-based webapp running with Postgres, Kafka, and Elasticsearch. Your stack requires pretty decent knowledge of: 1. Postgres 2. Kafka 3. Elasticache 4. Linux (and a…

Counterpoint: stop the sprawl. Use boring technology.

Until you’re at quite a high scale, you probably don’t actually need Kafka. There are plenty of much lighter ways to do pub/sub, including Postgres itself.

Similarly, if your RDBMS schema is properly defined and your queries are well-written, you probably also don’t need Redis / EC.

Re: K8s, if you do need it, I’m not sure why people think that it’s so much easier to run EKS than your own cluster. The only thing you get to skip is the control plane; everything else is still your responsibility. Same with Postgres – you still are wholly responsible for its schema/table maintenance and optimization on major DBaaS.

In any case, nowhere did I say one person should be an expert at all of this.

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

#113

Post by rcarmo » Mon, Oct 21, 2024, 3:47 PM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #29

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…

Continuing this reasoning... As soon as your startup does get big, it starts to make more sense to try and migrate to 'dumb' machines and save on infrastructure costs, especially if your business is low margin and your infrastructure costs are high.

And then all of a sudden you run into more engineering costs. Companies use platform services because one dev/engineer can do a lot more on their own and focus on delivering business value rather than twiddle knobs.

And adding one dev/engineer is _massively_ more expensive, so you seldom want to scale in that axis when the option is to, say, use a managed database or even a complete data pipeline.

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

#114

Post by rcarmo » Mon, Oct 21, 2024, 3:52 PM UTC

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…

Hear hear. I get this all the time. People just don’t get that what they are paying for, say, platform services (managed databases, indexing, all sorts of data handling) is vastly cheaper than reimplementing those particular wheels - or hiring the people to manage them - and that the hyperscalers provide redundancy, automated deployment, backups, the works.

Even storage in hyperscalers is inherently redundant—and I keep getting folk who ask about setting up their own RAID array, or using their own containers and job management when there’s a dozen zero-code alternatives in each individual hyperscaler.

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

#115

Post by rcarmo » Mon, Oct 21, 2024, 3:54 PM UTC

handwarmers wrote: post #87

taberiand wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The caveat to this is, you might think you need RDS, SQS, SNS, S3, Lambda, DynamoDB, Elasticache and Kinesis - but you probably only need Postgres.

one day someone will rewrite postgres in rust, and i will have to switch to carpentry full time to preserve my sanity.

You might need to do that even before it ships the complete feature set.

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

#116

Post by rcarmo » Mon, Oct 21, 2024, 3:55 PM UTC

sgarland wrote: post #71

vishnugupta wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. To add, if you every want to get ISO/PCIDSS etc certification done then good luck implementing gazillion check list items which Azure/AWS/GCP have already taken care of.

Which is bullshit, because the auditors ALWAYS miss stuff, even things I would think are painfully obvious. It’s a cottage industry that allows the C-Suite to assure investors that they have taken all necessary precautions, so when they get hacked they can point and say “we were certified!”

It’s not a cottage industry. It is literally the law if you need to operate in some regions.

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

#117

Post by rcarmo » Mon, Oct 21, 2024, 3:59 PM UTC

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…

Those per-request models usually don’t pan out well. They’re conceptually simple, but you soon realize that you need at least a couple of 24/7 always on boxes and that you only really should use Cloud Run-like services for burstable workloads.

PaaS services or even VM scaling sets with volatile instances can still be stupefyingly cheaper, but that point is really hard to make to architecture astronauts.

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

#118

Post by rcarmo » Mon, Oct 21, 2024, 4:00 PM UTC

tetha wrote: post #16

> Do you really need the advanced features of AWS and Azure right now? Or would a simple virtual machine at a reasonable price be sufficient? That’s the main question here. This is one of the more important points and why the point "The learning curve of a single server isn't so big, especially when compared to AWS" is sitting a bit wrong with me. Sure, if you talk about 1 VM, I agree. And I wouldn't second guess doi…

I have a single VM for my personal stuff, but I use Azure’s backup and automated fail-over mechanisms as well as managed services for database and data processing for this very reason.

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

#119

Post by londons_explore » Mon, Oct 21, 2024, 4:02 PM UTC

spott wrote: post #108

londons_explore wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Continuing this reasoning... As soon as your startup does get big, it starts to make more sense to try and migrate to 'dumb' machines and save on infrastructure costs, especially if your business is low margin and your infrastructure costs are high.

The flip side is that when you are small, you probably don’t need all the fancy managed services that AWS offers. Simpler solutions can save you money and time.

I'm a big proponent of appengine/heroku and similar platforms for small startups.

You can almost certainly fit all your business logic into one or two appengine apps, and fit all your data into one database. While you have just a few programmers, the fact they're all sharing a process with eachother won't matter.

The goal is working product and paying customers ASAP, not a nicely architected microservices backend 2 years from now.

Yes, it'll end up being a mess when the company has pivoted and changed directions a bunch of times, and when you finally come to get to 50M users+ scale you'll probably have to rewrite from scratch. But by then, you ought to be rewriting from scratch, because you won't know the true requirements till you get to that scale.

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

#120

Post by rcarmo » Mon, Oct 21, 2024, 4:02 PM UTC

thegeomaster wrote: post #6

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.

I would probably host even some business-critical services on Hetzner's infra. I'm thinking of "worker"-type workloads, where each machine is 100% stateless and just serves to do some compute-intensive work. With that configuration, single-node data loss doesn't really affect you, and the CPU is plentiful and cheap with Hetzner bare metal (e.g. AX101 AMD machines).

Yeah, but where would you store state? The hyperscalers give you pretty reasonable durable storage (even datalakes). Most people don’t get storage tiering or using PaaS for workers, though.