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Kubernetes on Hetzner: cutting my infra bill by 75%

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Re: Kubernetes on Hetzner: cutting my infra bill by 75%

#151

Post by sofixa »

alt227 wrote: post #136
davedx wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2% of total worldwide electricity use in 2022 is a shit load of electricity and emissions. Your argument is the same as those who argue "our country shouldn't care about emissions when China is the biggest emitter". If you dive into a detailed breakdown of emissions you'll find that it's a complex hierarchy of categories. You can't just fix "all of transport" or treat it like a "low hanging fruit", just look at how m…

> our country shouldn't care about emissions when China is the biggest emitter To be fair, until China does something about their emissions, the rest of us are just pissing in the ocean.

China is actively working on reducing their emissions (they're building tons of nuclear and renewables, and have long term plans for both), and a lot of theirs are to manufacture stuff the whole world uses.

Re: Kubernetes on Hetzner: cutting my infra bill by 75%

#152

Post by jpgvm »

jacooper wrote: post #71
ronsor wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading comments from the past few days makes it seem like dealing with Hetzner is a pain (and as far as I can tell, they aren't really that cheaper than the competitors).

Honestly hetzner supoort has bren outstanding from my experience. They are always there and very responsive using email

If you prefer no bullshit communications they are great. They are to the point, terse and very German. I find this both refreshing and exactly what I want/need out of support. The few times I have needed to contact them it's been HW related. One was a SSD that was clearly having issues even though SMART reported nothing wrong, I sent them blktrace output and they said yup that checks out, scheduled disk replacement right away. The other time was a network related problem with their transit, I had some ASNs that I was trying to talk to suddenly getting some pretty damn cursed paths and a big increase in latency as a result, they sorted out the path weights super fast and everything has been great since.

The only other time I have received better support was from Aussie ISPs. Back in the day when you called Internode the guy who answered the phone was a bona-fide network engineer and would go as far as getting a shell on the DSLAM to check out what is going on. To me that is peak support, live debugging of the problem!

Similarly I called into Aussie Broadband to do my first NBN setup, explained I did "BYO" modem because I was going to initiate the PPPoE session with my Linux router and they said no problem. She even offered to send me a cookie cutter pppd config along with the info to set it up myself. Easily the some of the most knowledgeable and "can do" attitude for first layer support I have encountered.

Needless to say when I encounter damn good support I stay even when it costs more.

Re: Kubernetes on Hetzner: cutting my infra bill by 75%

#153

Post by Aachen »

ArtTimeInvestor wrote: post #36

Can anybody speak to the pros and cons of Hetzner vs OVH? There ain't many large European cloud companies, and I would like to understand how they differentiate. Ionos is another European one. Currently, it looks like their cloud business is stagnating, though.

My main complaint with OVH is that their checkout process is broken in various ways (missing translations so you get French bits, broken translations so placeholders like ACCEPT_BUTTON leak through, legally binding terms with typos and weird formatting because someone copied them from a PDF into a textarea, UIs from the 90s plastered in between modern ones, missing option to renew a domain for longer than a year, confusing automatic renewal setup, and so on). The control panel in general is quite confusing. They also don't allow hosting an email server (port 25 blocked), iirc the docs tell you to go away and use a competitor

I didn't have any of these web UI issues with Hetzner, but iirc OVH is cheaper for domain names, as well as having very reliable and fast DNS servers (measured various query types across some 6 months), and that's why I initially chose them — until my home ISP gave me a burned IP address and I needed an externally hosted server for originating email data (despite it coming from an old and trusted domain that permitlists the IP address) so now I'm with both OVH and Hetzner... Anyway, another thing I like in OVH is that you can edit the raw zone file data and that they support some of the more exotic record types. I don't know how Hetzner compares on domain hosting though

Re: Kubernetes on Hetzner: cutting my infra bill by 75%

#154

Post by wvh »

I work for a consultancy company that helps companies building and securing infrastructure. We have a lot of customers running Kubernetes at low-cost providers (like Hetzner), more local middle-tier and top-three (AWS, GCP, Azure). We also have some governmental, financial and medical companies that can not or will not run in public clouds, so they usually host on-prem.

If Hetzner has an issue or glitch once a month, the middle-tier providers have one every 2-3 months, and a place like AWS maybe every 5-6 months. However, prices also follow that observation, so you have to carefully consider on a case-by-case basis whether adding some extra machines and backup and failure scenarios is a better deal.

The major benefit by using basic hosting services is that their pricing is a lot more predictable; you pay for machines and scale as you go. Once you get hooked into all the extra services a provider like AWS provides, you might get some unexpectedly high bills and moving away might be a lot harder. For smaller companies, don't make short-sighted decisions that threaten your ability to survive long-term by choosing the easy solution or "free credits" scheme early on.

There is no right answer here, just trade-offs.

Re: Kubernetes on Hetzner: cutting my infra bill by 75%

#155

Post by mzhaase »

slillibri wrote: post #12

When I worked in web hosting (more than 10 years ago), we would constantly be blackholeing Hetzner IPs due to bad behavior. Same with every other budget/cheap vm provider. For us, it had nothing to do with geo databases, just behavior. You get what you pay for, and all that.

I had to try multiple floating IPs on hcloud before I got one that wasn't blacklisted on the k8s repos.

Re: Kubernetes on Hetzner: cutting my infra bill by 75%

#156

Post by j16sdiz »

ArtTimeInvestor wrote: post #36

Can anybody speak to the pros and cons of Hetzner vs OVH? There ain't many large European cloud companies, and I would like to understand how they differentiate. Ionos is another European one. Currently, it looks like their cloud business is stagnating, though.

I use Scaleway for my EU cloud needs.

This is a very low usage toy server, can't speak for performance/cost.

Re: Kubernetes on Hetzner: cutting my infra bill by 75%

#157

Post by jillesvangurp »

The key take home point here is not how amazingly cheap Hetzner is, which it is. But how much of an extortion game Google, Amazon, MS, etc. are playing with their cloud services. These are trillion dollar companies because they are raking in cash with extreme margins.

Yes, there is some added value in the level of convenience provided. But maybe with a bit more competition, pricing could be more competitive. A lot more competitive.

Re: Kubernetes on Hetzner: cutting my infra bill by 75%

#158

Post by bigbones »

adamcharnock wrote: post #133

We've [1] been using Hetzner's dedicated servers to provide Kubernetes clusters to our clients for a few years now. The performance is certainly excellent, we typically see request times half. And because the hardware is cheaper we can provide dedicated DevOps engineering time to each client. There are some caveats though: 1) A staging cluster for testing updates is really a must. YOLO-ing prod updates on a Sunday is…

> dedicated 10G network to connect your servers

Do you have to ask Hetzner nicely for this? They have a publicly documented 10G uplink option, but that is for external networking and IMHO heavily limited (20TB limit). For internal cluster IO 20TB could easily become a problem

Re: Kubernetes on Hetzner: cutting my infra bill by 75%

#159

Post by acac10 »

// Taking another slant at the discussion: Why kubernetes?

Thank you for sharing your experience. I also have my 3 personal servers with Hetzner, plus a couple VM instances in Scaleways (French outfit).

Disclaimer: I’m a Googler, was SRE for ~10 years for GMail, identity, social, apps (gsuites nowadays) and more, managed hundreds of jobs in Borg, one of the 3 founders of the current dev+devops internal platform (and I focused on the releases,prod,capacity side of the platform), dabbled in K8s on my personal time. My opinions, not Google’s.

So, my question is: given the significant complexity that K8s brings (I don’t think anyone disputes this) why are people using it outside medium-large environments? There are simpler and yet flexible & effective job schedulers that are way easier to manage. Nomad is an example.

Unless you have a LOT of machines to manage, with many jobs (I’d say +250) to manage, K8s complexity, brittleness and overhead are not justifiable, IMO.

The emergence of tools like Terraform and the many other management layers in top of K8s that try to make it easier but just introduce more complexity and their own abstractions are in itself a sign of that inherent complexity.

I would say that only a few companies in the world need that level of complexity. And then they will need it, for sure. But, for most is like buying a Formula 1 to commute in a city.

One other aspect that I also noticed is that technical teams tend to carry on the mess they had in their previous “legacy” environment and just replicate in K8s, instead of trying to do an architectural design of the whole system needs. And K8s model enables that kind of mess: a “bucket of things”.

Those two things combined, mean that nowadays every company has soaring cloud costs, are running things they know nothing about but are afraid to touch in case of breaking something. And an outage is more career harming than a high bill that Finance will deal with it later, so why risk it, right? A whole new IT area has been coined now to deal with this: FinOps :facepalm:

I’m just puzzled by the whole situation, tbh.

Re: Kubernetes on Hetzner: cutting my infra bill by 75%

#160

Post by lproven »

tutfbhuf wrote: post #116
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is definitely some ChatGPT output being posted here and your post history also has a lot of this "While X, Y also does Z. Y already overlaps with X" output. I'd like to see your breakdowns as well, given that the cost difference between a 2 vCPU, 4GB configuration (as an example) and a similar configuration on AWS is priced much higher. There's also https://github.com/kube-hetzner/terraform-hcloud-kube-hetzne...…

It is my ouput, but I use ChatGPT to fix my spelling and grammar. Maybe my prompt for that should be refined in order to not alter the wording too much.

> I use ChatGPT to fix my spelling and grammar

I have a better suggestion, which will save time, energy, money, and human work.

Don't.

Write it yourself. If you can't, don't post.

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