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Don't rent the cloud, own instead

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Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#181

Post by adamcharnock »

wulfstan wrote: post #165
Lucasoato wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hetzner is definitely an interesting option. I’m a bit scared of managing the services on my own (like Postgres, Site2Site VPN, …) but the price difference makes it so appealing. From our financial models, Hetzner can win over AWS when you spend over 10~15K per month on infrastructure and you’re hiring really well. It’s still a risk, but a risk that definitely can be worthy.

I've just shifted my SWE infrastructure from AWS to Hetzner (literally in the last month). My current analysis looks like it will be about 15-20% of the cost - £240 vs 40-50 euros. Expect a significant exit expense, though, especially if you are shifting large volumes of S3 data. That's been our biggest expense. I've moved this to Wasabi at about 8 euros a month (vs about $70-80 a month on S3), but I've paid transit…

FYI, AWS offers free Egress when leaving them (because they were forced to be EU regulation, but they chose to offer it globally):

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/free-data-transfer-out-to-i...

But. Don't leave it until the last minute to talk to them about this. They don't make it easy, and require some warning (think months, IIRC)

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#182

Post by Archelaos »

adamcharnock wrote: post #74

This is an industry we're[0] in. Owning is at one end of the spectrum, with cloud at the other, and a broadly couple of options in-between: 1 - Cloud – This is minimising cap-ex, hiring, and risk, while largely maximising operational costs (its expensive) and cost variability (usage based). 2 - Managed Private Cloud - What we do. Still minimal-to-no cap-ex, hiring, risk, and medium-sized operational cost (around 50%…

I am using something inbetween 2 and 3, a hosted Web-site and database service with excellent customer support. On shared hardware it is 22 €/month. A managed server on dedicated hardware starts at about 50 €/month.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#183

Post by figmert »

Havoc wrote: post #176

Interesting that they go for no redundancy

What redundancy are we talking about? AWS has proven to the world on multiple occasions that redundancy across geo locations is useless, because if us-east-1 is down, their whole cloud is done, causing a big chunk of the world to be down.

Half sarcasm of course, but it goes to show that the world is not going to fall apart in many cases when it comes to software. Sure, it's not ideal in lots of cases, but we'll survive without redundancy.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#184

Post by nubela »

Same thing. I was previously spending 5-8K on DigitalOcean, supposedly a "budget" cloud. Then the company was sold, and I started a new company on entirely self-hosted hardware. Cloudflare tunnel + CC + microk8s made it trivial! And I spend close to nothing other than internet that I already am spending on. I do have solar power too.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#185

Post by StilesCrisis »

adamcharnock wrote: post #118
weavie wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the upper limit of Hertzner? Say you have an AWS bill in the $100s of millions, could Hertzner realistically take on that scale?

An interesting question, so time for some 100% speculation. It sounds like they probably have revenue in the €500mm range today. And given that the bare metal cost of AWS-equivalent bills tends to be a 90% reduction, we'll say a €10mm+ bare metal cost. So I would say a cautious and qualified "yes". But I know even for smaller deployments of tens or hundreds of servers, they'll ask you what the purpose is. If you say…

Why would a client who wants to run a Blockchain be risky for Herzner? I'm not a fan, I just don't see the issue. If the client pays their monthly bill, who cares if they're using the machine to mine for Bitcoin?

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#186

Post by jongjong »

swiftcoder wrote: post #100
jongjong wrote: post #97

Or better; write your software such that you can scale to tens of thousands of concurrent users on a single machine. This can really put the savings into perspective.

If you were to read TFA, it is about ML training workloads, not web servers

Well the article starts out with a suggestion that we should all get a data center... It's quite a jump to assume that everyone reading this article needs to train their own LLMs.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#187

Post by re-thc »

torginus wrote: post #151
adamcharnock wrote: post #74

This is an industry we're[0] in. Owning is at one end of the spectrum, with cloud at the other, and a broadly couple of options in-between: 1 - Cloud – This is minimising cap-ex, hiring, and risk, while largely maximising operational costs (its expensive) and cost variability (usage based). 2 - Managed Private Cloud - What we do. Still minimal-to-no cap-ex, hiring, risk, and medium-sized operational cost (around 50%…

I think the issue with this formulation is what drives the cost at cloud providers isn't necessarily that their hardware is too expensive (which it is), but that they push you towards overcomplicated and inefficient architectures that cost too much to run. A core at this are all the 'managed' services - if you have a server box, its in your financial interest to squeeze as much per out of it as possible. If you're us…

> your infra is so efficient and cheap that even paying 4x for it rather than going for colocation is well worth it because of the QoL and QoS.

You don’t need colocation to save 4x though. Bandwidth pricing is 10x. EC2 is 2-4x especially outside US. EBS for its iops is just bad.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#190

Post by spwa4 »

bojangleslover wrote: post #175
adamcharnock wrote: post #74

This is an industry we're[0] in. Owning is at one end of the spectrum, with cloud at the other, and a broadly couple of options in-between: 1 - Cloud – This is minimising cap-ex, hiring, and risk, while largely maximising operational costs (its expensive) and cost variability (usage based). 2 - Managed Private Cloud - What we do. Still minimal-to-no cap-ex, hiring, risk, and medium-sized operational cost (around 50%…

Great comment. I agree it's a spectrum and those of us who are comfortable on (4) like yourself and probably us at Carolina Cloud [0] as well, (4) seems like a no brainer. But there's a long tail of semi-technical users who are more comfortable in 2-3 or even 1, which is what ultimately traps them into the ransomware-adjacent situation that is a lot of the modern public cloud. I would push back on "usage-based". Yes…

The problem is that clouds have easily become 3 or 5 times the price of managed services, 10x the price of option 3, and 20x the price of option 4. To say nothing of the fact that almost all businesses can run fine on "pc under desk" type situations.

So in practice cloud has become the more expensive option the second your spend goes over the price of 1 engineer.

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