The title should have been "...from AWS and DigitalOcean".
If it were only from AWS, they would probably also have mentionned a drastic reduction of API complexity.
Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
421–430 of 643 posts
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#422Earlier 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?
Hosting a database is no different than self-hosting any other service. This viewpoint hath what cloud wrought, this atrophying of the most basic operational skills, as if running these magic services are only achievable by the hyperscalers who said they are the only ones capable.
The answers to all of your questions are a hard: it depends. What are your engineering objectives? What are your business requirements? Uptime? Performance? Cost constraints and considerations? The cloud doesn't take away the need to answer these questions, it's just that self-hosting actually requires you to know what you are doing versus clicking a button and just hoping for the best.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#423Earlier 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…
I've been in projects where they're 'on the cloud' to be 'scalable', but I had to estimate my CPU needs up front for a year to get that in the budget, and there wasn't any defined process for "hey, we're growing more than we assumed - we need a second server - or more space - or faster CPUs - etc". Everything that 'cloud' is supposed to allow for - but ... that's not budgeted for - we'll need to have days of meetings to determine where the money for this 'upgrade' is coming from. But our meetings are interrupted by notices from teams that "things are really slow/broken"...
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#424Questions for people who migrate off-cloud: 1. How many nodes do you have? 2. Did you install anything to monitor your node(s) and the app deployed on these nodes? If so, which software?
1. Around 30, a mix of both x64 and ARM. But planning on switching heavy workloads to physical machines at some point, which would take total node count down to around 16.
2. OpenTelemetry Collector installed on all nodes, sending data to a self-hosted OpenObserve instance. UI is a little clunky, but it's been an invaluable tool, and it handles everything in one place - logs, traces, metrics, alerts.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#425I 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…
If you’re big, invest in this. If you’re small, slap Dokploy/Coolify on it.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cloud providers and even cloudflare go down regularly. Relax.
Sure - but when AWS goes down, Amazon fixes it, even on the weekends. If you self-host, you need to pay a person to be on call to fix it.
AWS doesn't have to pay people (LOTS OF PEOPLE) to keep things running over the weekends?
And they aren't...just passing those costs on to their customers?
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you don't want to do this yourself, then we'll do it for you for half the price of AWS (and we'll be your DevOps team too You might not realize but you are actually increasing the business case for AWS :-) Also those hardware savings will be eaten away by two days of your hourly bill. I like to look at my project costs across all verticals...
> Also those hardware savings will be eaten away by two days of your hourly bill Doubt it. I've personally seen AWS bills in the tens of thousands, he's probably not that costly for a day.
Same, but in the hundreds of thousands monthly and growing at steady clip, and AWS extending credits worth -millions-, just to keep them there because their margins are so fat and juicy they can afford that insane markup.
That's where the real value lies. Not paying these usurious amounts.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#428Earlier 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.
If "cloud" took zero time, then sure. It actually takes a lot of time.
"It's actually really easy to set up Postgres with high availability and multi-region backups and pump logs to a central log source (which is also self-hosted)" is more or less equivalent to "it's actually really easy to set up Linux and use it as a desktop"
In fact I'd wager a lot more people have used Linux than set up a proper redundant SQL database
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#429I 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…
I do not disagree, but just for the record, that's not what the article is about. They migrated to Hetzner cloud offering.
If they had migrated to a bare metal solution they would certainly have enjoyed an even larger increase in perf and decrease in costs, but it makes sense that they opted for the cloud offering instead given where they started from.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
#430Earlier 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…
It's really hard to do blue/green on prem with giant expensive database servers. Maybe if you're super big and you can amortize them over multiple teams, but most shops aren't and can't. The cloud is great.