Frankly the idea of managing the db myself seems like a horrible idea and a lot of work. But perhaps I've been indoctrinated by the big cloud.
Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
331–340 of 643 posts
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
That used to be the case until recently. As much as neither I nor you want to admit it -- the truth is ChatGPT can handle 99% of what you would pay for "a team to maintain network and continually secure and monitor the server and update/patch." Infact, ChatGPT surpasses them as it is all encompassing. Any company now can simply pay for OpenAI's services and save the majority of the money they would have spent on the,…
You have a link to some proof that chat gpt is patching servers running databases with no down time or data loss?
I think the argument is that dev with some vibe coding can successfully setup servers that are good enough already for 10x less cost and 95% reliability
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
These physics are exactly the same with AWS et al.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I agree that running servers onprem does not need to be hard in general, but I disagree when it comes to doing production databases.
I've done onprem highly available MySQL for years, and getting the whole master/slave thing go just right during server upgrades was really challenging. On AWS upgrading MySQL server ("Aurora") is really just a few clicks. It can even do blue/green deployment for you, where you temporarily get the whole setup replicated and in sync so you can verify that everything went OK before switching over. Disaster recovery (regular backups to off site & ability to restore quickly) is also hard to get right if you have to do it yourself.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#335There are footguns to be found with a self operated k8s cluster, and definitely (costly) ones with cloud native database orchestration. Not to mention all the risks which come with migrating to "new things" in general. I know for me that when I moved away from those things to managed AWS versions, I could definitely see the value of a cloud solution.
But that cost difference is huge...
It is a interesting tradeoff to consider I think (I'm not criticizing either Hetzner or AWS or any team's decision, provided they've thought the tradeoffs through).
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#336Earlier 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.
As a self hosting fan, i cant even fathom how hard it would be to even get started running a Postgres or redis cluster on AWS.
Like, where do I go? Do i search for Postgres? If so where? Does the IP of my cluster change? If so how to make it static? Also can non-aws servers connect to it? No? Then how to open up the firewall and allow it? And what happens if it uses too much resources? Does it shutdown by itself? What if i wanna fine tune a config parameter? Do I ssh into it? Can i edit it in the UI?
Meanwhile, all that time finding out, and I could ssh into a server, code and run a simple bash script to download, compile, run. Then another script to replicate. And i can check the logs, change any config parameter, restart etc. no black box to debug if shit hits the fan
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#337I've always thought these services seemed overpriced, like users were subsidizing a ferocious amount of R&D and speculative expansion off their fees. I mean, it's just hosting webservices - this feels like it should be a commodity at this point.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#338I 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…
Yup, I hope to god we are moving past the age of 'everything's fast if you have enough machines' and 'money is not real' era of software development.
I remember the point in my career when I moved from a cranky old .NET company, where we handled millions of users from a single cabinent's worth of beefy servers, to a cloud based shop where we used every cloud buzzword tech under the sun (but mainly everything was containerized node microservices).
I shudder thinking back to the eldritch horrors I saw on the cloud billing side, and the funny thing is, we were constantly fighting performance problems.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#339In my experience, there has been an interesting ebb and flow on the use of 'dedicated' hardware and auto-scaling power of AWS/cloud instances. When first starting out, super cost-conscious, you're getting ideal performance. As soon as you start experiencing interesting traffic patterns, auto-scaling makes sense. Then, your bill grows to such a point as it makes economical sense to pull back to more powerful dedicated services, then lean a little into auto-scaling, etc. A pendulum of underlying services and people to support it. A balancing act of finding efficiencies during wild growth periods, and reaching some sense of stability.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#340I 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…
Virtualization has a crazy overhead - when we moved to metal instances in AWS, we gained like 20-25% performance. I thought that since AWS has the smartest folks in the business and Intel & co. has been at this for decades, it'd be like a couple percent overhead at most, but no.