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Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
321–330 of 643 posts
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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.
If you’re just running some CRUD web service, then you could certainly find significantly cheaper hosting in a data center or similar, but also if that’s the case your hosting bill is probably a very small cost either way (relative to other business expenses).
> You virtually never need scalability so fast that you don't have time to add another server
What do you mean by “time to add another server?” Are you thinking about a minute or two to spin up some on-demand server using an API? Or are you talking about multiple business days to physically procure and install another server?
The former is fine, but I don’t know of any provider that gives me bare metal machines with beefy GPUs in a matter of minutes for low cost.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#323Earlier 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.
except you now have your developers chasing their own tails figuring out how to insert the square peg in the round hole without bankrupting the company. cloud didn't save time, it just replaced the wheels for the hamsters.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#324Earlier 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…
That's a cultural issue. Initially at my workplace people needed to ask permissions to deploy their code. The team approving the deployment got sick of it and built a self-service deployment tool with security controls built in and now deployment is easy. All it matters is a culture of trusting other fellow employees, a culture of automating, and a culture of valuing internal users.
Agreed, that's exactly what I was aiming at. I'm not saying that it's the only advantage of Cloud, but that orgs with a dysfunctional resource-access culture were a fertile ground for cloud deployments.
Basically: some managers gets fed-up with weeks/months of delays for baremetal or VM access -> takes risks and gets cloud services -> successful projects in less time -> gets promoted -> more cloud in the org.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#325Saving $426/mo for a business seems like a waste of time and resources. The excessive frugal developer complex. How many hours did it take to do the migration?
As the business grows so will that inefficiency and migrating now is much less work than migrating later.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#326Saving $400/month covers about 3-5 hours of engineering time per month. In a year, call it 30-50 hours. Did this project take more than 30-50 person-hours?
(The obvious argument about how it might pay off more in the future are dependent on the startup surviving long enough for that future to arrive.)
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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.
I'm a designer with enough front-end knowledge to lead front-end dev when needed.
To someone like me, especially on solo projects, using infra that effectively isolates me from the concerns (and risks) of lower-level devops absolutely makes sense. But I welcome the choice because of my level of competence.
The trap is scaling an org by using that same shortcut until you're bound to it by built-up complexity or a persistent lack of skill/concern in the team. Then you're never really equipped to reevaluate the decision.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have a substantiated source for the "12x the unfair risk of account termination without warning". I tried looking for it but all I could find were unsubstantiated grapevine (I heard they ...) posts with lots of people stating the opposite.
Edited. Not only have I read numerous reports of it both on this site and on Reddit, but it personally happened to me around 2022. The number of such reports that I have read is easily 12x that of AWS. In contrast, AWS or any other cloud never did anything like this to me. This is risked if the CPU or another resource is using close to 100% for a couple of months. Hetzner likes customers that pay for what they don't…
Reddit anecdotes are not a good way to sell a given argument lol.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#329Earlier 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.
> 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
Last I checked, stack overflow and all of the stack exchange sites are hosted on a single server. The people who actually need to handle more traffic than that are in the 0.1% category, so I question your implicit assumption that you actually need a Postgres and Redis cluster, or that this represents any kind of typical need.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#330Dedicated 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…
My experience is exactly the opposite. None of the cloud vendors are actually resilient, every single one of them have had major global outages. And when it happens you've got no influence on how fast it gets fixed. The only way of building a truly resilient infrastructure eith cloud vendors is mirroring across vendors. But it happens to be easier to mirror a private cloud between e.g. Hetzner and OVH than maintaining parallel setups in Azure and AWS.