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Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

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Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#411

Post by AtlasBarfed »

hibikir wrote: post #352
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.

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 clou…

Yeah, clouds are such a huge improvement over what was basically an industry standard practice to say oh you want a server fill out this 20 page form and will get you your server in 6 to 12 months.

But we don't need one minute response times from the cloud really. So something like hetzner that may just be all right. We'll get it to you within an hour. It's still light years ahead of what we used to be.

And if it makes the entire management and cost side and performance with bare metal or closer to bare metal on the provider side, then that is all good.

And this doesn't even address the fact that yeah, AWA has a lot of hidden costs, but a lot of those managed data center outsourcing contracts where you were subjected to those lead times for new servers... really weren't much cheaper than AWS back in the day.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#412

Post by binary132 »

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.

It’s kinda good if your requirements might quadruple or disappear tonight or tomorrow, but you should always have a plan to port to reserved / purchased capacity.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#413

Post by binary132 »

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 don’t find AWS complicated you really haven’t used AWS.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#414

Post by 7bit »

awestroke wrote: post #399
api wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I really don't understand this comment. The cloud doesn't protect you from data loss or provide any of the things you named.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#415

Post by mschuster91 »

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…

Actually... for Postgres specifically, it's less than 5 minutes to do so in AWS and you get replication, disaster recovery and basic monitoring all included.

I hated having to deal with PostgreSQL on bare metal.

To answer your questions should someone ask these as well and wish answers:

> Does the IP of my cluster change? If so how to make it static?

Use the DNS entry that AWS gives you as the "endpoint", done. I think you can pin a stable Elastic IP to RDS as well if you wish to expose your RDS DB to the Internet although I have really no idea why one would want that given potential security issues.

> Also can non-aws servers connect to it? No?

You can expose it to the Internet in the creation web UI. I think the default the assistant uses is to open it to 0.0.0.0/0 but the last time I did that is many years past so I hope that AWS asks you about what you want these days.

>Then how to open up the firewall and allow it?

If the above does not, create a Security Group, assign the RDS server to that Security Group and create an Ingress rule that either only allows specific CIDRs or a blanket 0.0.0.0/0.

> And what happens if it uses too much resources? Does it shutdown by itself?

It just gets dog slow if your I/O quota is exhausted, it goes into an error state when the disk goes full. Expand your disk quota and the RDS database becomes accessible again.

> What if i wanna fine tune a config parameter? Do I ssh into it? Can i edit it in the UI?

No SSH at all, not even for manually unfucking something, for that you need the assistance of the AWS support - but in about six years I never had a database FUBAR'ing itself.

As for config parameters, there's an UI for this called "parameter/option groups", you can set almost all config parameters there, and you can use these as templates for other servers you need as well.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#416

Post by fisf »

speleding wrote: post #334
codegeek wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 temporar…

If you are running k8s on prem, the "easy" way is to use a mature operator, taking care of all of that.

https://github.com/percona/percona-xtradb-cluster-operator https://github.com/mariadb-operator/mariadb-operator or CNPG for Postgres needs. They all work reasonable well, and cover all the basic (HA, replication, backups, recovery, etc).

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#417

Post by jwr »

withinboredom wrote: post #210
jwr wrote: post #66

I'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…

Similar setup to me (including rethinkdb). Why choose FoundationDB? RethinkDb is still maintained and features added occasionally (I'm on the rethinkdb slack and maintain an async php driver). It just is one guy though, working on it part time.

RethinkDB is somewhat maintained, and while it is a very good database and works quite well, it is not future-proof. But the bigger reason is that I need better performance, and by now (after 10 years) I know my data access patterns well, so I can make really good use of FoundationDB.

The reason for FoundationDB specifically is mostly correctness, it is pretty much the only distributed database out there that gives you strict serializability and delivers on that promise. Performance is #2 on the list.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#418

Post by mschuster91 »

trenchpilgrim wrote: post #359
AznHisoka wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?"

For AWS RDS, no big deal. Bare metal or Docker? Oh now THAT is a world of pain.

Seriously I despise PostgreSQL in particular in how fucking annoying it is to upgrade.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#419

Post by objektif »

ripped_britches wrote: post #274
objektif wrote: post #249

Startup founders and employees are you really paying insane bills to AWS? How? We are really paying peanuts compared to other expenses.

Probably depends on what your business is and the LTV of your customers

May be but not sure. How many Figma type startups out there paying $500k a day? As opposed to just traditional SaaS/OpenAi wrapper. I just don’t see it.
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