You've saved $426/mo but inherited a $10k/mo full-time DevOps job.
Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
231–240 of 643 posts
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#232This is pretty bad still, with colocation you can get the costs down to 1/100th with good deals at datacenters especially ones that are struggling to attract customers. Most of your bill is power so if you rack efficiency optimized servers you can have a lot of compute for very cheap. In terms of networking many offer no-headache solutions with some kind of transit blend. I recently had to switch away from hetzner du…
But when you are Colocating you have higher upfront costs as you need to acquire hardware and also need to have somebody nearby the datacenter for hardware swaps in case of a failure, no?
There's higher upfront costs, but typically we find that we are breakeven for the cost of hardware in 12 months or less. In my experience, colos will have techs available for hardware swaps / remote hands troubleshooting if needed. It's not free for that but it solves that problem. I think it really just depends on your company's needs and skillset. For our company it makes sense to colocate. We are a VOIP service provider, so we also have multiple IP transit providers and our own /22 subnet. We use BGP to change / pull routes quickly when there's outages with an ISP or cloud provider. I know AWS supports a setup like that, but you're relying on them for announcing route changes.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#233I've been running my SaaS on Hetzner servers for over 10 years now. Dedicated hardware, clusters in DE and FI, managed through ansible. I use vpncloud to set up a private VPN between the servers (excellent software, btw). My hosting bill is a fraction of what people pay at AWS or other similar providers, and my servers are much faster. This lets me use a simpler architecture and fewer servers. When I need to scale, I…
Nice to see someone still using RethinkDB.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#234After being immersed in cloud-native hell for a few years, I'll say it: This setup is probably also easier to reason about and easier to make secure than the messy garbage pushed by Amazon and other cloud providers. People see Cloud providers with rose-colored glasses, but even something like RDS requires VPCs, subnets, route tables, security groups, Internet/NAT gateways, lots of IAM roles, and CloudWatch to be usab…
> This setup is probably also easier to reason about and easier to make secure than the messy garbage pushed by Amazon and other cloud providers.
Ability to do anything doesn't mean do everything.
It's straightforward to be simple on AWS, but if you have trouble denying yourself, consider Lightsail to start: https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#235Hetzner 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…
> Also at one point there were no VMs available anymore in our region, which caused a lot of issues. I'm not sure if this is a difference between other clouds, at least a few years ago this was a weekly or even daily problem in GCP; my experience is if you request hundreds of VMs rapidly during peak hours, all the clouds struggle.
We launch 30k+ VMs a day on GCP, regularly launching hundreds at a time when scheduled jobs are running. That’s one of the most stable aspects of our operation - in the last 5 years I’ve never seen GCP “struggle” with that except during major outages.
At the scale of providers like AWS and even the smaller GCP, “hundreds of VMs” is not a large amount.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
> no need to ask permission to anyone, ownership of your resources, etc In a large enough org that experience doesn’t happen though - you have to go through and understand how the org’s infra-as-code repo works, where to make your change, and get approval for that.
You also need to get budget, few months earlier, sometimes even legal approval. Then you have security rules, „preferred” services and the list goes on..
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#237Dedicated servers on a host like Hetzer and OVH surely beats any virtualization based cloud offering on price and performance. The tradeoff is availability. It's a great choice for entities that are optimizing on cost, but not a great choice if your business cannot tolerate downtime. A good example is a the big lichess outage from last year [1]. Lichess is a non-profit, and also must serve a huge user base. Given the…
You can have reliability with physical servers. When you pay 1/4 for 3X the performance you can duplicate your servers and then be paying 1/2 for 3X the performance. I find baffling that people forget about how things were done before the cloud.
Hetzner only has one Datacenter/AZ per region. So you either risk a single region failure taking you down, or you lose performance from transferring data to another location.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#238I really liked Hetzner but I got burned by one issue. I had some personal projects running there and the payment method failed. Automated email communications also failed among so much spam and email notifications I receive, and when I noticed the problem they had wiped all my data without possibility of recovery. It was a wake up moment for me about keeping billing in shape, but also made me understand that a cloud…
Sorry to hear that. But if you do not pay and you do not check your e-mails, it's basically your fault. Who is using SMS these days even?
I had payment issues with Hetzner too, that was back in 2018, haven’t used them since. At least back then, and at least for me, they were unlike any other provider I’ve used which would send you plenty of warnings if they fail to bill you. The very first email I got from them that smelt of trouble was “Cancellation of Contract”, at which point my account was closed and I could only pay by international bank wire. (Yes I just checked all my correspondence with them to make sure I’m not smearing them.) Amusingly they did send payment warning after account closure. Why not before? No effing clue. That was some crazy shit.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#239Second hand hardware for the win
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#240You've saved $426/mo but inherited a $10k/mo full-time DevOps job.
Do you think Devops is not required when you use cloud providers or something? Of course it is...