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Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

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Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#461

Post by AtlasBarfed »

bstsb wrote: post #452
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mak…

in my experience i can rescale Hetzner servers and they'll be ready in a minute or two

Yes, sorry, I didn't mean to impugn Hetzner by saying they were an hour delay, just that there could be providers that are cheaper that didn't need to offer AWS-level scaling.

Like a company should be able to offer 1 day service, or heck 1 week with their internal datacenters. Just have a scheduled buffer of machines to power up and adapt the next week/month supply order based on requests.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#462

Post by desireco42 »

This doesn't make sense to me. Businesses don't switch to save from $500 to $150. It just doesn't make sense. I think they did it because of political reasons, but they should just say so.

I am in US, I would use Hetzner just the same, but not to save few bucks here and there.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#463

Post by marcosdumay »

cube00 wrote: post #365
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.

What could make sense if the OP was talking about a less than 30% difference.

What country is it that applies a 400% income tax to companies?

(Well, seriously, it makes sense in a larger than 80% tax rate. Not that impossibly high, but I doubt any country ever had it.)

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#464

Post by AtlasBarfed »

codegeek wrote: post #301
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.

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'd much rather deploy cassandra, admittedly a complex but failure resistant database, on internal hardware than on AWS. So much less hassle with forced restarts of retired instances, noisy nonperformant networking and disk I/O, heavy neighbors, black box throttling, etc.

But with Postgres, even with HA, you can't do geographic/multi-DC of data nearly as well as something like Cassandra.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#465

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

> We saved 76% on our cloud bills while tripling our capacity

The claim here is that their cloud bills lowered. Nowhere is mentioned the cost of engineering and support. This will increase their overall cost, which is not mentioned here at all.

When you are a startup, you don't have a lot of headcount. You should be using your headcount to focus on your product. The more things you do that eat up your headcount's time, the less time you have to develop your product.

You need a balance between "dirt-cheap cost" and labor-conserving. This means it's a good idea to pay a little bit of a premium, to give you back time and headcount.

> How much does a 2x CPU, 4 GiB RAM container cost on AWS Fargate? Just over $70/month. We run two worker instances, which need these higher resources, along with smaller web instances and all the other infrastructure needed to host an application on AWS (load balancer, relational DB, NAT gateway, ...). All together, our total costs for two environments of tap grew to $449.50/month.

The classic AWS mistake: they're talking retail prices. AWS gives every customer multiple opportunities to lower costs below this retail price. You don't have to be an enterprise. In fact, you can ask them directly how to save money, and they'll tell you.

$70/month is the retail price of Fargate on-demand (for that configuration). Using a Compute Savings Plan[1], you can save 50% of this cost. Additionally, if you switch from x86 to ARM for your Fargate tasks, the cost lowers an additional 25%. So with Graviton and a Compute Savings Plan, their Fargate price would have been $26.25/month, a 62.5% savings.

And there's more to save. Spot instances are discounted at 70%. NAT Instances save you money over NAT Gateways. Scaling your tasks to zero when they're not needed cuts costs more. Choose the cheapest region to pay the least.

[1] https://repost.aws/questions/QUVKyRJcFPStiXYRVPq-KU9Q/saving...

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#466

Post by rgrieselhuber »

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…

We moved DemandSphere from AWS to Hetzner for many of the same reasons back in 2011 and never looked back. We can do things that competitors can’t because of it.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#467

Post by marcosdumay »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #357
sealeck wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do know you can have high availability without using cloud providers? E.g. you run a second server in a different database as a standby that can take over, etc.

I mean the (virtual) machine itself has these guarantees. You can set the entire rack on fire and your VM will continue to operate or else you're owed compensation for the SLA violation. You can add redundant machines with a failover. You then need to calculate how likely the failover is to fail, how likely the machines are to fail, etc. How likely is the switch to fail. You need engineers with pager rotations to giv…

> What I'm saying is that the cloud providers give you strong guarantees and this is reflected in their pricing.

and yet, they go offline all the time.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#468

Post by Lorin »

I'd like to thank everyone moving their hosting away from shared hosts to VPS.

Been on the same shared hosting platform for 15+ years and the hardware's load average dropped to ~16% on a 64-core Epyc /w 512gb RAM. Easily handles half million unique bursts without breaking a sweat.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#469

Post by joshuaissac »

abujazar wrote: post #202
Aissen wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an infrastructure engineer (amongst other things), hard disagree here. I realize you might be joking, but a bit of context here: a big chunk of the success of Cloud in more traditional organizations is the agility that comes with it: (almost) no need to ask permission to anyone, ownership of your resources, etc. There is no reason that baremetal shouldn't provide the same customer-oriented service, at least for th…

The permissions and ownership part has little to do with the infrastructure – in fact I've often found it more difficult to get permissions and access to resources in cloud-heavy orgs.

This could be due to the bureaucratic parts of the company being too slow initially to gain influence over cloud administration, which results in teams and projects that use the cloud being less hindered by bureaucracy. As cloud is more widely adopted, this advantage starts to disappear. However, there are still certain things like automatic scaling where it still holds the advantage (compared to requesting the deployment of additional hardware resources on premises).

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#470

Post by [deleted] »

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.…

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