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Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

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Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#371

Post by dijit »

epistasis wrote: post #368
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?

"new", I'm not sure, but I deployed 2,500 physical Windows machines with SaltStack and it worked pretty good.

it also handled some databases and webservers on FreeBSD and Windows, I considered it better than Ansible.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#372

Post by breadislove »

V__ wrote: post #268
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…

This sound really intriguing, and I am really curious. What kind of service do you run where you need a 100s of VMs? Was there a reason for not going dedicated? Looking at their offering their biggest VM is (48 CPU, 192 GB RAM, 960 GB SSD). I can't even imagine using that much. Again, I'm really curious.

we have extremely processing heavy jobs where user upload large collection of files (audios, pdfs, videos etc.) and expect to get fast processing. its just that we need to fan out sometimes, since a lot of our users a sensitive to processing times.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#373

Post by petit_robert »

lossolo wrote: post #80
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…

> The tradeoff is availability. This is a myth, created so cloud providers can sell more, and so those who overpay can feel better. I've been using dedicated servers since 2005, so for 20 years across different providers. I have machines at these providers with 1000-1300 days of uptime.

> I have machines at these providers with 1000-1300 days of uptime

You did not say what system you use on them, but don't you need to reboot them to apply kernel upgrades, for instance?

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#375

Post by jerf »

bearjaws wrote: post #367
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.…

I didn't try to hit that because that's harder to call, especially at a small startup. If what is probably "the guy doing all this" happens to be more comfortable with k8s than the AWS stack you can end up winning by going with a nominally more complicated k8s stack that doesn't force you to spend dozens of hours learning more new things and instead just using what you already know. For a small startup those training costs are proportionally huge compared to a more established larger going concern already making money. Startups should generally always go with whatever their engineers already know unless there is a damned good reason not to. (And "I just wanted to learn it" is not a good reason for the startup.)

But monetarily, even for a startup, $400/month savings is something you shouldn't be pouring the equivalent of $5000 (or more, just picking a reasonable concrete number to anchor the point) into. You really need to solve a $400/month problem by putting your time into something, anything that will promote revenue growth sooner and faster rather than optimizing that particular cost.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#376

Post by lazyfanatic42 »

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…

haha this reminds me of when I used to manage Solaris system consisting of 2 servers. Sparc T7, 1 box in one state and 1 box in another. No load balancer.

Thousands and thousands of users depending on that hardware.

Extremely robust hardware.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#377

Post by infecto »

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…

This smells like “Dropbox is just rsync”. No skin in the game I think there are pros and cons to each but a Postgres cluster can be as easy as a couple clicks or an entry into a provisioning script. I don’t believe you would be able to architect the same setup with a simple single server ssh and a simple bash script. Unless you already wrote a bash script that magically provisions the cluster across various machines.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#378

Post by alberth »

whstl wrote: post #191
alberth wrote: post #186

There's a value curve for infrastructure, I'll use an analogy... Low Cost High Cost ============================================================== FARM WHOLESALER GROCERY RESTAURANT DOORDASH BUILD CO-LOCATION HETZNER AWS VERCEL While it's not a perfect analogy, in principle it holds true. As such, it should come as no surprise that eating at a restaurant every day is going to be way more expensive.

AWS is more of high-scale cook-your-own pizza restaurant where you can't see the bill until the end, and you often have to mop the floor and wash the latrines yourself too. And washing the latrine costs money too of course, but you don’t wanna get salmonella, right?

That's were my analogy isn't perfect.

There's different tiers of restaurants.

There's the luxury premium restaurants (Michelin star rated, like AWS), but there is also local dinners that arguably have phenomenal food too (maybe someone like DigitalOcean/Linode).

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#379

Post by groestl »

Deploying to bare metal Hetzner for years, very happy with the service. Smart hands work fast and reliable. As soon as you got your stack worked out (which admittedly takes a while), maintaining bare metal is not much different from maintaining cloud, apart from swapping disks sometimes. And the cost is so low, in comparison, it's ridiculous.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#380

Post by lelanthran »

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.

> 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

It's "only a few clicks" after you have spent a signficant amount of time learning AWS.

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