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Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

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Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#301

Post by codegeek »

odie5533 wrote: post #266
radu_floricica wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is old is new again. Over the years I tried occasionally to look into cloud, but it never made sense. A lot of complexity and significantly higher cost, for very low performance and a promise of "scalability". You virtually never need scalability so fast that you don't have time to add another server - and at baremetal costs, you're usually about a year ahead of the curve anyways.

Complexity? I've never set up a highly available Postgres and Redis cluster on dedicated hardware, but I can not imagine it's easier than doing it in AWS which is only a few clicks and I don't have to worry about OS upgrades and patches. Or a highly available load balancer with infinite scale.

This is how the cloud companies keep you hooked on. I am not against them of course but the notion that no one can self host in production because "it is too complex" is something that we have been fed over the last 10-15 years. Deploying a production db on a dedicated server is not that hard. It is about the fact that people now think that unless they do cloud, they are amateurs. It is sad.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#302

Post by codegeek »

chatmasta wrote: post #271
kitd wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are usually the biggest cost in any organisation. If you can run all your systems without the sysadmins & netadmins required to keep it all upright (especially at expensive times like weekends or run up to Black Friday/Xmas), you can save yourself a lot more than the extra it'll cost to get a cloud provider to do it all for you.

I can’t believe this cloud propaganda remains so pervasive. You’re just paying DevOps and “cloud architects” instead.

Exactly. It's sad that we have been brain washed by the cloud propaganda long enough now. Everyone and their mother thinks that to setup anything in production, you need cloud otherwise it is amaeteurish. Sad.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#304

Post by mjr00 »

kitd wrote: post #253
radu_floricica wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is old is new again. Over the years I tried occasionally to look into cloud, but it never made sense. A lot of complexity and significantly higher cost, for very low performance and a promise of "scalability". You virtually never need scalability so fast that you don't have time to add another server - and at baremetal costs, you're usually about a year ahead of the curve anyways.

People are usually the biggest cost in any organisation. If you can run all your systems without the sysadmins & netadmins required to keep it all upright (especially at expensive times like weekends or run up to Black Friday/Xmas), you can save yourself a lot more than the extra it'll cost to get a cloud provider to do it all for you.

Yeah I always just kinda laugh at these comparisons, because it's usually coming from tech people who don't appreciate how much more valuable people's time is than raw opex. It's like saying, you know it's really dumb that we spend $4000 on Macbooks for everyone, we could just make everyone use Linux desktops and save a ton of money.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#305

Post by jamesblonde »

breadislove wrote: post #19

Hetzner 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…

The blocking of services on Hetzner and Scaleway by Microsoft is well known -

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jeroen-jacobs-8209391_somethi...

I didn't know AWS and GCP also did it. Not surprised.

The problem is that European regulators do nothing about such anti-competitive dirty tricks. The big clouds hide behind "lots of spam coming from them", which is not true.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#306

Post by kccqzy »

rightbyte wrote: post #159
adamcharnock wrote: post #150

I 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.

My employer also resisted using cloud compute and sent staff explanations why building our own data centers is a good thing.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#307

Post by Damogran6 »

rightbyte wrote: post #159
adamcharnock wrote: post #150

I 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 a career security guy, I've lost count of the battles I've lost in the race to the cloud...now it's 'we have to up the budget $250k a year to cover costs' and you just shrug.

The cost for your first on-prem datacenter server is pretty steep...the cost for the second one? Not so much.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#308

Post by hylaride »

master_crab wrote: post #43
vidarh wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite Jeff Bezos quote is one that applies very much to AWS: "your margin is my opportunity". Clearly when Amazon realised the enormous potential in AWS, they scrapped that principle. But the idea behind it - that an organisation used to fat margins will not be able to adapt in the face of a competitor built from the ground to live of razor thing margins - still applies. AWS is ripe for the picking. They "can't…

"your margin is my opportunity" Yup, that phrase was running through my head as I skimmed the comments. To that, an interesting observation I’ve made is that their frequency for service price cuts have dropped in the past several years. And the instances of price increases have started to trickle in (like the public IP cost). If core compute and network keep getting cheaper faster than inflation, and they never drop…

The worst aspect of AWS is that once you get to a certain size, you can negotiate bulk agreements, especially for things like bandwidth. At a previous job, we cut our bill down by quite a bit this way, but it was annoying to have to schmooze with sales people.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#309

Post by adamcharnock »

wiether wrote: post #296
Esophagus4 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha! My only “yes, but…” is that this: > 50k API calls per second (on S3 that is $20-$250 _per second_ on API calls!). kind of smells like abuse of S3. Without knowing the use case, maybe a different AWS service is a better answer? Not advocating for AWS, just saying that maybe this is the wrong comparison. Though I do want to learn about Hetzner.

They conveniently provide no detail about the usecase, so it's hard to tell But, yeah, there's certainly a solution to provide better performances for cheaper, using other settings/services on AWS

We're hoping to write a case study down the road that will give more detail. But the short version is that not all parts of the client's organisation have aligned skills/incentives. So sometimes code is deployed that makes, shall we say, 'atypical use' of the resources available.

In those cases, it is great to a) not get a shocking bill, and b) be able to somewhat support this atypical use until it can be remedied.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#310

Post by LaurensBER »

cisophrene wrote: post #33

Dedicated 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…

This is a very good point but even with dedicated servers it's doable to build a resilient HA architecture.

OVH offers a managed kubernetes solution which for a team experienced with Kubernetes and/or already using containers would be a fairly straightforward way to get a solid HA setup up and running. Kubernetes has its downsides and complexity but in general it does handle hardware failures very well.

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