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Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

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Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#361

Post by nkozyra »

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…

Having lived in both worlds, there are services wherein, yeah, host it yourself. But having done DB on-prem/on-metal, dedicated hosting, and cloud, databases are the one thing I'm happy to overpay for.

The things you describe involve a small learning curve, each different for each cloud environment, but then you never have to think about it again. You don't have to worry about downtime (if you set it up right), running a bash script ... literally nothing else has to be done.

Am I overpaying for Postgres compared to the alternatives? Hell yeah. Has it paid off? 100%, would never want to go back.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#362

Post by Volundr »

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…

> Do i search for Postgres?

Yes. In your AWS console right after logging in. And pretty much all of your other setup and config questions are answered by just filling out the web form right there. No sshing to change the parameters they are all available right there.

> And what happens if it uses too much resources?

It can't. You've chosen how much resources (CPU/Memory/Disk) to give it. Run away cloud costs are bill by usage stuff like redshift, s3, lambda, etc.

I'm a strong advocate for self (for some value of self) hosting over cloud, but your making cloud out to be far more difficult than it is.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#363

Post by trenchpilgrim »

naasking wrote: post #329
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.

> 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 qu…

SO was hosted on a single rack last I checked, not a single box. At the time they had an MS SQL cluster.

Also, databases can easily see a ton of internal traffic. Think internal logistics/operations/analytics. Even a medium size company can have a huge amount of data, such as tracking every item purchased and sold for a retail chain.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#364

Post by czhu12 »

We discovered a similar cost saving and I ended up building an internal PaaS that i ended up open sourcing, that works well on hetzner.

The biggest downside to hetzner only is that it’s really annoying to wrangle shell scripts and GitHub actions to drive all the automations to deploy code.

The portainer team recently started sponsoring the project so Ive been able to dedicate a lot more time to it, close to full time.

https://canine.sh

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#365

Post by cube00 »

1a527dd5 wrote: post #201

Love it! We are unfortunately moving away from self-hosted bare metal. I disagree with the transition to AWS. But it's been made several global layers above me. It's funny our previous AWS spend was $800 per month and has been for almost 6 years. We've just migrated some of our things to AWS and the spend is around $4,500 per month. I've been told the company doesn't care until our monthly is in excessive of five fig…

> None of this makes sense to me.

OpEx good, CapEx bad.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#366

Post by lossyalgo »

jamesblonde wrote: post #305
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.

First comment on that post claims that according to Mimecast, 37% of EU-based spam originates from Hetzner and Digital Ocean. People have been asking for 3 days for a link to the source (I can't find it either).

On the other hand, someone linked a report from last year[0]:

> 72% of BEC attacks in Q2 2024 used free webmail domains; within those, 72.4% used Gmail. Roughly ~52% of all BEC messages were sent from Gmail accounts that quarter.

[0] https://docs.apwg.org/reports/apwg_trends_report_q2_2024.pdf

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#367

Post by bearjaws »

jerf wrote: post #326

Saving $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.)

I feel like this is left out of the story too often - people tend to compare the most optimistic "self-hosted", usually just one or two servers at best, to a less than ideal cloud installation.

My parent company (Healthcare) uses all on prem solutions, has 3 data centers and 10 sys admins just for the data centers. You still need DevOps too.

I don't know how much it would cost to migrate their infra to AWS, but ~ $1.3M (salary) in annual spend buys you a ton of reserved compute on AWS.

$1.3M is 6000 CPU cores, 10TiB of RAM 24/7 with 100TB of storage.

I know for a fact due to redundancy they have no where near that, AND they have to pay for Avamar, VMWare, (~$500k) etc.

There's no way its cheaper than AWS, not even close.

So sure someones self hosted PHP BB forum doesn't need to be on AWS, but I challenge someone to run a 99.99% uptime infra significantly cheaper than the cloud.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#368

Post by epistasis »

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 do you recommend for configuration management? I've had a fairly good experience with Ansible, but that was a long time ago... anything new in that pace?

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#369

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#370

Post by whstl »

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.

If you are talking about RDS and ElasticCache, it’s definitely NOT a few clicks if you want it secure and production-ready, according to AWS itself in their docs and training.

And before someone says Lightsail: is not meant for highly availability/infinite scale.

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