Really digging these post-mortems on major public cloud migrations of late, either to smaller providers like Hetzner or privately-owned solutions in data centers. It gives me more ammo when an organization tasks me with saving them money, by showing that these are, in fact, perfectly viable options whose tradeoffs may be worthwhile for specific organizational needs.
Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
171–180 of 643 posts
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but after over a week of trying to diagnose the issue and convince them that it wasn't an problem That sucks big time :( In the most recent case I can recall, I successfully got access, noticed weirdness, gathered data and sent an email, and had a new instance within 2-3 hours. Overall, based on comments here on HN and otherwhere, the quality and speed of support is really uneven.
> based on comments here on HN and otherwhere, the quality and speed of support is really uneven. Can you name one tech company that's scaled passed the point where the founders are closely involved with support that has consistently good tech support? I think this is just really hard to get right, as many customers are not as knowledgeable as they think they are.
"Consistently" is hard, people's experiences tend to differ with every company out there, even by what country you're currently in. For example, I've always had quick and reasonable replies from Coinbase support, but I know friends who've had the complete opposite experience with Coinbase, so won't claim they're consistent. But their replies to me has been consistent at least.
Probably the company most people have had any sort of consistency from would be Stripe I think. Of course, there are cases where they haven't been great, but if you ask me for a company with the best tech support, Stripe comes to mind first.
I'm not sure it's active anymore, but there used to be a somewhat hidden and unofficial support channel in #stripe@freenode back in the day, where a bunch of Stripe developers hanged out and helped users in an in-official capacity. That channel was a godsend more than once.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#173The public cloud is priced as if availability, reliability, durability, and latency matter to your business. If they don't, you can get far with just a single machine. A great deal of the work in cloud engineering is ensuring the abstractions meet the service guarantees. Similarly you can make a car much cheaper if you don't need to guarantee the driver will survive a collision. The cost of providing a safety guarant…
You do know you can have high availability without using cloud providers? E.g. you run a second server in a different database as a standby that can take over, etc.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#174I think you can get much farther with dedicated servers. I run a couple of nodes on Hetzner. The performance you get from a dedicated machine even if it is a 3 year old machine that you can get on server auction is absolutely bonkers and cannot be compared to VMs. The thing is that most of the server hardware is focused towards high core count, low clock speed processors that optimize for I/O rather than compute. It…
Quite a few options on https://serversearcher.com that sell in US/CA.
Clouvider is available in alot of US DCs, 4GB ram/2cpu/80GB NVME and a 10Gb port for like $6 a month.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#175Hetzner is really great until you try to scale with them. We started building our service on top of Hetzner and had couple 100s of VMs running and during peak time we had to scale them to over 1000 VMs. And here couple of problems started, you get pretty often IPs which are black listed, so if you try to connect to services hosted by Google, AWS like S3 etc. you can't reach them. Also at one point there were no VMs a…
We scaled to ~1100 bare metal servers with them and it worked perfectly.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#176Quick note that while I hear nothing but good things about Hetzner, the approach is generic -- applies to the many other bare metal "SmallCo" providers. For example we use Hivelocity and have been very happy. Perhaps also worth mentioning that you can literally buy computers and rent space to plug them in and hook up to the internet in a place we call a data center. That's even cheaper when you know your workload long term and have access to capital.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#177Are there decent US based alternatives to Hetzner? I'd like to have my servers located in the US for a variety of reasons, but most of the alternatives I've seen to Hetzner seem to be pretty fly-by-night shops.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is one key draw to Big Cloud and especially PaaS and managed SQL for me (and dev teams I advise). Not having an ops background I am nervous about: * database backup+restore * applying security patches on time (at OS and runtime levels) * other security issues like making sure access to prod machines is restricted correctly, access is logged, ports are locked down, abnormal access patterns are detected * DoS and…
to be fair, AWS' database restore support is generally only a small part of the picture - the only option available is to spin an entirely new DB cluster up from the backup, so if your data recovery strategy isn't "roll back all data to before the incident", you have to build out all your own functionality for merging the backup and live data...
I think the "strategy" for most people is to do it manually, or make the decision to just revert wholesale to a particular time.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#179Are there decent US based alternatives to Hetzner? I'd like to have my servers located in the US for a variety of reasons, but most of the alternatives I've seen to Hetzner seem to be pretty fly-by-night shops.
Hetzner has 2 DCs in the US with solid peerings and transit.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#180I cannot overstate the performance improvement of deploying onto bare metal. We typically see a doubling of performance, as well as extremely predictable baseline performance. This is down to several things: - Latency - having your own local network, rather than sharing some larger datacenter network fabric, gives around of order of magnitude reduced latency - Caches – right-sizing a deployment for the underlying har…
What is old is new again. My employer is so conservative and slow that they are forerunning this Local Cloud Edge Our Basement thing by just not doing anything.
As an infrastructure engineer (amongst other things), hard disagree here. I realize you might be joking, but a bit of context here: a big chunk of the success of Cloud in more traditional organizations is the agility that comes with it: (almost) no need to ask permission to anyone, ownership of your resources, etc. There is no reason that baremetal shouldn't provide the same customer-oriented service, at least for the low-level IaaS, give-me-a-VM-now needs. I'd even argue this type of self-service (and accounting!) should be done by any team providing internal software services.