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Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

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Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#351

Post by adamcharnock »

realitysballs wrote: post #222
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…

Ya but then you need to pay for a team to maintain network and continually secure and monitor the server and update/patch. The salaries of those professionals , really only make sense for a certain sized organization. I still think small-midsized orgs may be better off in cloud for security / operations cost optimization.

I very much understand this, and that is why we do what we do. Lots of companies feel exactly as you say. I.e. Sure it is cheaper and 'better', but we'll pay for it in salaries and additional incurred risk (what happens if we invest all this time and fail to successfully migrate?)

This is why we decided to bundle engineering time with the infrastructure. We'll maintain the cluster as you say, and with the time left over (the majority) we'll help you with all your other DevOps needs too (CI/CD pipelines, containerising software, deploying HA Valkey, etc). And even after all that, it still costs less than AWS.

Edit: We also take on risk with the migration – our billing cycle doesn't start until we complete the migration. This keeps our incentives aligned.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#352

Post by hibikir »

radu_floricica wrote: post #215
rightbyte wrote: post #159

Earlier 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.

A nimble enough company doesn't need it, but I've had 6 months of lead time to request one extra server in an in-house data center due to sheer organizational failure. The big selling point of the cloud really was that one didn't have to deal with the division lording over the data center, or have any and all access to even log in by their priesthood who knew less unix than the programmers.

I've been in multiple cloud migrations, and it was always solving political problems that were completely self inflicted. The decision was always reasonable if you looked just at the people the org having to decide between the internal process and the cloud bill. But I have little doubt that if there was any goal alignment between the people managing the servers and those using them, most of those migrations would not have happened.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#354

Post by epistasis »

rcxdude wrote: post #292
ecshafer wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every large organization that is all in on cloud I have worked at has several teams doing cloud work exclusively (CICD, Devops, SRE, etc), but every individual team is spending significant amounts of their time doing cloud development on top of that work.

This. There's a lot of talk of 'oh you will spend so much time managing your own hardware' when I've found in practice it's much less time than wrangling the cloud infrastructure. (Especially since the alternatives are usually still a hosting provider that mean you don't have to physically touch the hardware at all, though frankly that's often also an overblown amount of time. The building/internet/cooling is what co…

I think you are very right, and to be specific, IAM roles, connecting security groups, terraform plan/apply cycles, running Atlantis through GitHub, all that takes tremendous amounts of time and requires understanding a very large set of technologies on top of the basic networking/security/PostGRES knowledge.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#355

Post by redbell »

Nice writeup, I like it and would definitely bookmark for future reference.

One weak take however in the article that I felt not quite right is the pricing saving part. By saying 1/4 of the price. I was expecting to see the AWS bill in the range of $10k/month, or more but it turned out to be just around ~$550 or, a total saving of $420.

Whith the above said, it does really make me questioning whether it worth the hassle of migration because, probably, one of the main reasons to move away from AWS is to save the cost.

Finally, let me conclude with this comment from /r/programminghumor:

    You're not a real engineer until you've accidentally sponsored Amazon's quarterly earnings

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#357

Post by ants_everywhere »

sealeck wrote: post #173
ants_everywhere wrote: post #165

The public cloud is priced as if availability, reliability, durability, and latency matter to your business. If they don't, you can get far with just a single machine. A great deal of the work in cloud engineering is ensuring the abstractions meet the service guarantees. Similarly you can make a car much cheaper if you don't need to guarantee the driver will survive a collision. The cost of providing a safety guarant…

You do know you can have high availability without using cloud providers? E.g. you run a second server in a different database as a standby that can take over, etc.

I mean the (virtual) machine itself has these guarantees. You can set the entire rack on fire and your VM will continue to operate or else you're owed compensation for the SLA violation.

You can add redundant machines with a failover. You then need to calculate how likely the failover is to fail, how likely the machines are to fail, etc. How likely is the switch to fail. You need engineers with pager rotations to give 24 hour coverage, etc.

What I'm saying is that the cloud providers give you strong guarantees and this is reflected in their pricing. The guarantees apply to every service you consume because with independent failures, the probability of not failing is multiplicative. If you want to build a reliable system out of N components then you need to have bounds on the reliability of each of the components.

Your business may not need this. Your side project almost certainly doesn't. But the money you save isn't free, it's compensation for taking on the increased risk of downtime, losing customer data, etc.

I would be interested to see a comparison of the costs of running a service on Hetzner with the same reliability guarantees as a corresponding cloud service. On the one hand we expect some cloud service markup for convenience. On the other hand they have economies of scale. So it's not obvious to me which is cheaper.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#358

Post by cube00 »

andybak wrote: post #153

I love how few comments on this and similar posts give much context along with their advice. Are you hosting a church newsletter in your spare time or a resource intensive web app with millions of paying enterprise customers and a dedicated dev ops team in 3 continents? Any advice on price / performance / availability is meaningless unless you explain where you're coming from. The reason we see people overcomplicatin…

> The reason we see people overcomplicating everything to do with the web is that they follow advice from people with radically different requirements.

Or they've had cloud account managers sneaking into your C-suite's lunchtime meetings.

Other comments in this thread say they get directives to use AWS from the top.

Strangely that directive often comes with AWS's own architects embedded into your team and even more strangely they seem to recommend the most expensive server-less options available.

What they don't tell is you you'll be rebuilding and redeploying your containerised app daily with new Docker OS base images to keep up with the security scanners just like patching an OS on a bare metal server.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#359

Post by trenchpilgrim »

AznHisoka wrote: post #336
odie5533 wrote: post #266

Earlier 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.

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? Wha…

A fun one in the cloud is "when I upgrade to a new version of Postgres, how long is the downtime and what happens to my indexes?"

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#360

Post by wahnfrieden »

AznHisoka wrote: post #336
odie5533 wrote: post #266

Earlier 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.

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? Wha…

It is not as simple as you describe to set up HA multi-region Postgres

If you don't care about HA, then sure everything becomes easy! Until you have a disaster to recover and realize that maybe you do care about HA. Or until you have an enterprise customer or compliance requirement that needs to understand your DR and continuity plans.

Yugabyte is the closest I’ve seen to achieving that simplicity with self host multi region and HA Postgres and it is still quite a bit more involved than the steps you describe and definitely more work than paying for their AWS service. (I just mention instead of Aurora because there’s no self host process to compare directly there as it’s proprietary.)

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