The cloud makes sense when you have someone else's money to burn, and don't care about being held hostage with lock-in if you aren't careful.
Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
391–400 of 643 posts
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
"your margin is my opportunity" Yup, that phrase was running through my head as I skimmed the comments. To that, an interesting observation I’ve made is that their frequency for service price cuts have dropped in the past several years. And the instances of price increases have started to trickle in (like the public IP cost). If core compute and network keep getting cheaper faster than inflation, and they never drop…
The worst aspect of AWS is that once you get to a certain size, you can negotiate bulk agreements, especially for things like bandwidth. At a previous job, we cut our bill down by quite a bit this way, but it was annoying to have to schmooze with sales people.
Great you're pointing it out, as this is also something a lot of organisations are entirely unaware of in my experience.
If you're paying more than a few hundred k/year (worth starting to try below that; success rates will vary greatly) and are still paying the list prices, you might as well set fire to money.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#393I 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 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.
It's not really. It just happens that when there is a huge bullshit hype out there, people that fall for it regret and come back to normal after a while.
Better things are still better. And this one was clearly only better for a few use-cases that most people shouldn't care about since the beginning.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#394I've been running my SaaS on Hetzner servers for over 10 years now. Dedicated hardware, clusters in DE and FI, managed through ansible. I use vpncloud to set up a private VPN between the servers (excellent software, btw). My hosting bill is a fraction of what people pay at AWS or other similar providers, and my servers are much faster. This lets me use a simpler architecture and fewer servers. When I need to scale, I…
You use vpncloud to connect across different Hetzner data centers (DE + FI)? I thought/assumed Hetzner provided services to do this at little-to-no cost.
Not the GP, but I also use Hetzner, but use Tailscale to connect securely across different Hetzner regions (and indeed other VPS providers).
Hetzner does provide free Private Networks, but they only work within a single region - I'm not aware of them providing anything (yet) to securely connect between regions.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#395[deleted]
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#396Hetzner 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…
> Also at one point there were no VMs available anymore in our region, which caused a lot of issues. I'm not sure if this is a difference between other clouds, at least a few years ago this was a weekly or even daily problem in GCP; my experience is if you request hundreds of VMs rapidly during peak hours, all the clouds struggle.
I don't use Azure much anymore, but I used to see this problem regularly on Azure too, especially in the more "niche" regions like UK South.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#397Saving $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.…
Exactly this. I know people don't like to use this term (because it comes from traditional IT), but this is effectively known as TCO (total cost of ownership). The whole "bare metal" versus the well known hyperscalers debate often misses this with a hand-wavy "just get better devops people and its cheaper".
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I always just kinda laugh at these comparisons, because it's usually coming from tech people who don't appreciate how much more valuable people's time is than raw opex. It's like saying, you know it's really dumb that we spend $4000 on Macbooks for everyone, we could just make everyone use Linux desktops and save a ton of money.
What is this?! You are self-managing expensive dedicated hardware in form of MacBooks, instead of renting Azure Windows VM's?! Shame!
Don't be silly, - the MacBook Pro's are just used to RDP to the Azure Windows VMs ;)
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#399I 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…
How do you deprogram your devs and ops people from the learned helplessness of cloud native ideology? I've found that it's almost impossible to even hire people who aren't terrified of the idea of self-hosting. This is deeply bizarre for someone who installed Linux from floppy disks in 1994, but most modern devs have fully swallowed the idea that cloud handles things for them that mere mortals cannot handle. This, in…
So you'd rather self host a database as well? How do you prevent data loss? Do you run a whole database cluster in multiple physical locations with automatic failover? Who will spend time monitoring replication lag? Where do you store backups? Who is responsible for tuning performance settings?
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah I always just kinda laugh at these comparisons, because it's usually coming from tech people who don't appreciate how much more valuable people's time is than raw opex. It's like saying, you know it's really dumb that we spend $4000 on Macbooks for everyone, we could just make everyone use Linux desktops and save a ton of money.
If "cloud" took zero time, then sure.
It actually takes a lot of time.