Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

learn.umh.app

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 142 posts

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

#131

Post by nijave »

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 can run a 64x512GiB server in my home office loaded with NVMe drives for $80/mon (probably cheaper depending on how many years you amortize the server purchase over)!

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

#132

Post by nijave »

taberiand wrote: post #77
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…

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.

SQS/SNS/S3 are so simple, reliable, and cheap they're pretty much a no brainer. While you can probably run those workloads in Postgres, it isn't designed for those use cases and you'll eventually run into nasty limitations like managing vacuums with high churn tables and slow/complicated backups with big binary blobs.

If you have a good understanding of load up front, however, those are probably non-issues.

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

#133

Post by nijave »

sgarland wrote: post #63
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.

This has not been my experience at multiple companies with AWS, even with heavy spend – your tickets have to make it through a gatekeeper who has no more idea than you on how to fix it, and more triage than anything else.

In my experience, It Depends

For big flagship services you can usually get pretty good support (EC2, S3, SQS, Lambda)

For smaller/more niche services where AWS stood up a managed version of some OSS it's more hit and miss (like managed RabbitMQ).

In both cases, it definitely helps to have an open line to your TAM and send them case numbers and they'll usually do some internal nudging to keep things moving. In addition, for projects, you can usually reach out ahead of time and get some dedicated SMEs to help set things up/train you.

In either case, hopefully you've never had the displeasure of working with Azure support.

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

#134

Post by kikimora »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #127
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 "nic…

>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.

But only if they agree to be on call 24/7 to support what they deployed. Ask engineers to guarantee you won’t loose data and see how they tell you to buy RDS.

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

#135

Post by taberiand »

nijave wrote: post #132
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.

SQS/SNS/S3 are so simple, reliable, and cheap they're pretty much a no brainer. While you can probably run those workloads in Postgres, it isn't designed for those use cases and you'll eventually run into nasty limitations like managing vacuums with high churn tables and slow/complicated backups with big binary blobs. If you have a good understanding of load up front, however, those are probably non-issues.

I know, I'm mostly being tongue in cheek - the joke is so many companies go straight to complex cloud configurations more for the vibes than the actual practical need; a single box (two for availability) and a solid db will get most sites and businesses very far.

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

#136

Post by sgarland »

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.

And you have to hire people to do CloudOps. It is the same; if you think otherwise, you’re not at scale.

I promise you, running a DB in RDS is almost as difficult as running it on metal or a VM, except that when things go wrong, you don’t have as much insight into why.

Running a Linux server is not hard.

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

#137

Post by sgarland »

nijave wrote: post #126
rcarmo wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Setting up HA is approximately the same cost as with anything else: N x $cost. Web servers? Run two with HAProxy fronting them. Want HA HAproxy? Run two with a virtual IP. Etc. Not hard to calculate, not hard to set up. These are all extremely solved problems with tons of documentation available.

I mentioned monitoring being required and having a wide variety of options and price points.

If your DB runs out of space in a VM that’s on you for not having adequate monitoring and alerting. If you don’t have networked storage available and somehow fail to see the predicted eventual out of disk, again, that’s on you.

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

#138

Post by djhn »

nijave wrote: post #132
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.

SQS/SNS/S3 are so simple, reliable, and cheap they're pretty much a no brainer. While you can probably run those workloads in Postgres, it isn't designed for those use cases and you'll eventually run into nasty limitations like managing vacuums with high churn tables and slow/complicated backups with big binary blobs. If you have a good understanding of load up front, however, those are probably non-issues.

S3 is mind bogglingly expensive compared to Hetzner.

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

#139

Post by thegeomaster »

rcarmo wrote: post #120
thegeomaster wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd shy away from storing any non-volatile state on Hetzner. As I said, I'd mostly consider it for stateless compute-bound applications.

If I was looking to scale up an existing operation considerably and minimize costs as much as possible, I'd consider spinning up e.g. a Postgres cluster or minio on their infra, which would be significantly cheaper than RDS or S3. But it's not something that I would gladly do---the storage deals provided by hyperscalers are quite reasonable, as you say.

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

#140

Post by EdwardDiego »

akdev1l wrote: post #53
EdwardDiego wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Relying on volunteer support of varying degrees of quality for your business sounds insane. Also at that point the business should really be donating or contributing to the development of the software otherwise it is considered what we call a dick move.

People within my company do contribute to the development of the FOSS software we rely on :)

> Relying on volunteer support of varying degrees of quality for your business sounds insane.

Given my experiences of Confluent paid support, and my experiences of the volunteer support around Kafka, I disagree.

Post reply on HN