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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

#121

Post by rcarmo »

olieidel wrote: post #84
factormeta wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Take the recent Lichess downtime, for example. Their main server had a hardware issue that required physical intervention. This meant the site was down for over 10 hours, and there wasn't much they could do except wait for OVH to send a tech. If you not a HN person with systemadmin skills yes. But is NOT that hard to have in house RADI hd setup, with failover server. Or failover NAT gateway. AWS and cloud provider a…

Even something as magical as a RAID won't make a technician instantly teleport to your server, power it down in zero seconds, swap out the hard drive and boot it back up in another zero seconds. OPs comment is valid - physical servers might incur downtime. But I do agree with your sentiment. "Downtime" is not an argument which should tilt the discussion towards either physical servers or the cloud. AWS data centers f…

No, but if you have backups and DR set up, most hyperscalers will just automatically move your workload someplace else upon failure within minutes (state management complexity notwithstanding—you need to architect for that).

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

#122

Post by rcarmo »

theshrike79 wrote: post #15

...when using bare metal servers. Hetzner doesn't have the services AWS provides, that's the reason most companies I know use AWS for. If we could run our crap on any server, we would, but managed services are still cost-effective vs hiring our own 24/7/365 rotation of on-call ops people.

This.

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

#123

Post by rcarmo »

sgarland wrote: post #111
nijave wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All your points skip over the need to hire people to do Ops on those VMs.

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

#124

Post by vishnugupta »

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!”

I completely agree with you that they are mostly used as CYA. However, I'm speaking from practical standpoint where if you have to work in certain industries (banking, health, finance etc.,) the first thing you are asked is if you have XYZ certification.

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

#125

Post by CharlieDigital »

rcarmo wrote: post #117
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.

    > 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.
This is simply not true and Cloud Run-like services offer an easy path for progressive scaling.

1. You can scale it to 0 at the outset as you build your app

2. You can set it to scale to a minimum of n instances (e.g. minimum 1, 2) to have fast response times

3. If you find a need for a 24x7 instance, take the same container image and you can launch a Compute Engine instance with the container directly and scale that way.

4. If you need more control beyond that, move those containers into GKE Autopilot or full GKE or your container orchestrator of choice.

Not only is it easy and free to get started, it provides a straightforward path to adapting the underlying deployment and compute model based on needs as the app scales without the need to pay anything until you actually need 24x7 compute (and even then, it's a matter of setting your Cloud Run service to min=1 instances to get 24x7 compute or configuring a CE instance with the same exact container).

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

#126

Post by nijave »

rcarmo wrote: post #123
sgarland wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

All your points skip over the need to hire people to do Ops on those VMs.

Not only that, some things like monitoring you get for free on cloud providers and setting up your own HA stack is going to be significantly more expensive.

There's almost no testing and validation needed for something like AWS RDS Postgres backups. Occasionally you store an instance and that's it.

Other things like Postgres out-of-disk-space is a 10 min fix on AWS to increment the assigned space. If your VM provider is offering SAN/NAS you may be in luck, otherwise hopefully you have a balast file or some logs you can delete to free enough space to get things running long enough to fix the problem.

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

#127

Post by jauntywundrkind »

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…

I'm not sure what the cost difference is for using higher level services but I can easily imagine it 4x-10x'ing your costs again, or worse.

Part of me thinks, man, the engineers not afraid of setting up a p Postgres or Redis really should be worth a lot more, given how absurd the prices can get. I guess the getting started costs for these services are usually manageable though; by the time the bill is big it's a "nice problem to have" because you have significant load now, and presumably customers & revenue to show for it.

More so, I think orgs are somewhat rightfully afraid of running infra because historically we have been bad at it. It's been every sys-op or devops for themselves in the world. Everyone making their own practices, assembling their own stack of networking setup, init scripts, db procedures, monitoring, alerting, resilience/reliability. This stuff has a lot of dimensions of care to it.

And even when you go the extra mile to document everything, it's still rough to hand-off ownership. A new gal joins; how long does it take to get comfortable? And how much will her style & preferences mesh with whats been string up so far? Or worse, what happens when someone quits? How load bearing were they?

And this is why I'm so humungouely excited about Kubernetes. Fleet was pretty sweet & cool & direct in the past, RIP, but like so many of the "way to run containers" option it was just that: a way to run containers. Having an extensible system, where operators keep networking, storage, databases running, where tasks like backups and migrations and high availability are built in to well tested controllers: it cuts out so so so many things that operators had to discover, socialize, and test test test test test test before. There's such incredibly good load bearing systems-that-maintain-systems (i.g. autonomic) available, that compete very much with the paid for/managed services that have done likewise for us for so long.

And it's a consistent paradigm, for whatever you are up to. Write a manifest with what you want, send it to api-server, wait for operator to make it so. Instead of having different dimensions or concerns have different operational paradigms & styles, there's a unified extensible Desired State Management that does a damn good job.

It felt like running services was in a dark ages for so long, that each.shop was fractured & alone with their infrastructure, and it was obvious why managed services were winning. But today there's a hope that we can run services, well, in a way that will be very clear & explicit if it ever needs to be handed off.

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

#128

Post by rcarmo »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #125
rcarmo wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. This is simply not true and Cloud Run-like services offer an easy path for progressive scaling. 1. You can scale it to 0 at the outset as you build your app 2. You can set it to scale to a minimum of n instances (e.g. minimum 1…

I understand where you're coming from, but not everything speaks HTTP or works on a per-request basis, and PaaS services are still cheaper.

I've seen people shoehorning all sorts of batch processing into HTTP (backed by queues or not) and it has tremendous overhead over just having the cores and RAM there in the same place as the data.

I learned that lesson with Google Apps, and never designed anything to rely solely on HTTP ever again.

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

#129

Post by lossolo »

lelag wrote: post #85
factormeta wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Take the recent Lichess downtime, for example. Their main server had a hardware issue that required physical intervention. This meant the site was down for over 10 hours, and there wasn't much they could do except wait for OVH to send a tech. If you not a HN person with systemadmin skills yes. But is NOT that hard to have in house RADI hd setup, with failover server. Or failover NAT gateway. AWS and cloud provider a…

It is hard. Lichess admins are highly skilled and I'm sure they already have a well designed infrastructure. You can see what they use at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Si3PMUJGR9KrpE5lngSk... The issue was on a network equipment that they didn't even manage. You can't load balance when your core network is down. There was nothing they could do as I understand it. More details at: https://lichess.org/@/Liche…

Their architecture is not fault-tolerant. If one server goes down and the whole system goes down, then it was not designed to be fault-tolerant.

I have been running fault-tolerant systems spread across multiple dedicated servers (inside system with multiple DB/KV stores distributed/replicated/sharded, Kafka etc). If one server experiences hardware failure, the system will automatically recover within seconds to minutes (depending on which server/part of service failed) without any data loss.

It's not that hard. You need the knowledge, but it's not rocket science.

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

#130

Post by nijave »

sgarland wrote: post #111
nijave wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If we're only considering "runs on VMs" and "cost" then I can beat Hetzner by a huge margin running on the server in my home office. The point was, saying "it can run on a VM, who sells VMs the cheapest" is a largely useless comparison.
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