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Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

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Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#541

Post by xmcp123 »

theideaofcoffee wrote: post #422
awestroke wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? Up…

I would argue that correctly tuning a database is significantly more difficult than most services one would self host.

But that said, you can afford a lot more hardware if you’re not using RDS, so the tuning doesn’t need to be perfect.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#542

Post by shlomo_z »

codethief wrote: post #87
lisperforlife wrote: post #11

I think you can get much farther with dedicated servers. I run a couple of nodes on Hetzner. The performance you get from a dedicated machine even if it is a 3 year old machine that you can get on server auction is absolutely bonkers and cannot be compared to VMs. The thing is that most of the server hardware is focused towards high core count, low clock speed processors that optimize for I/O rather than compute. It…

> I would love to know if they are any north-american (particularly canadian) companies that can compete with price and the quality of service like Hetzner FWIW, Hetzner has two data centers in the US, in case you're just looking for "Hetzner quality but in the US", not for "American/Canadian companies similar to Hetzner".

I have been considering colocating at endoffice (I saw the suggestion once at codinghorror.com)

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#543

Post by kaliszad »

colechristensen wrote: post #458
bombcar wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My conspiracy theory is that "cloud scaling" was entirely driven by people who grew up watching sites get slash dotted and thought it was the absolute most important thing in the world that you can quickly scale up to infinity billion requests/second.

No, cloud adoption was driven by teams having to wait 2 years for capex for their hardware purchase and then getting a quarter of what they asked for. You couldn't get things, people hoarded servers they pretended to be using because when they did need something they couldn't get it. Management just wouldn't approve budgets so you were stuck using too little hardware. On the cloud it takes five seconds to get a new m…

Seems like a few negotiation skills would be of better use than doing extreme amounts of work so somebody can take months on approving new hardware. Well guess what, the people that did slow down hardware procurement are now slowing down deployment of cloud resources as well because the fundamental problem wasn't addressed and that's organizational misalignment and disfunction.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#545

Post by colechristensen »

kaliszad wrote: post #543
colechristensen wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, cloud adoption was driven by teams having to wait 2 years for capex for their hardware purchase and then getting a quarter of what they asked for. You couldn't get things, people hoarded servers they pretended to be using because when they did need something they couldn't get it. Management just wouldn't approve budgets so you were stuck using too little hardware. On the cloud it takes five seconds to get a new m…

Seems like a few negotiation skills would be of better use than doing extreme amounts of work so somebody can take months on approving new hardware. Well guess what, the people that did slow down hardware procurement are now slowing down deployment of cloud resources as well because the fundamental problem wasn't addressed and that's organizational misalignment and disfunction.

You're going to negotiate with the structure of an entire corporation?

Excuse me CEO your budgeting process is inconvenient to my work, please change it all to be more responsive.

This is not how things work and not how changes are made. Unless you get into the C-suite or at least become a direct report of someone who is nobody cares and you're told to just deal with it. You can't negotiate because you're four levels of management away from being invited to the table.

An organization that can make agile capital expenditures in response to the needs of an individual contributor is either barely out of the founder's garage or a magical fairyland unicorn.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#546

Post by colechristensen »

everforward wrote: post #486
colechristensen wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, cloud adoption was driven by teams having to wait 2 years for capex for their hardware purchase and then getting a quarter of what they asked for. You couldn't get things, people hoarded servers they pretended to be using because when they did need something they couldn't get it. Management just wouldn't approve budgets so you were stuck using too little hardware. On the cloud it takes five seconds to get a new m…

I think this is partially that for the past decade or two, on-prem was partially preferred by very frugal companies. One of the places I worked that was on-prem enforced a "standard hardware profile" where the servers were all nearly the same except things that could be changed in house (like RAM sticks). When they ordered hardware, they'd order like 5% or 10% more than we thought we'd need to keep an "emergency pool…

>I think this is partially that for the past decade or two, on-prem was partially preferred by very frugal companies.

Sure this is made worse by frugality, but I experienced this problem when virtualization was in its infancy, much less cloud anything even existing much less being popular.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#547

Post by mlnj »

kakoni wrote: post #544

Any k8s self-hosters here? How is that going?

Have been running a couple of machines on Hetzner cloud with https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-ks for about 2 years now.

Have been very happy with the setup. Also hosts a StackGres cluster that's backs up to GCS. Plenty of compute foe the price.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#549

Post by torginus »

dematz wrote: post #508
torginus wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, I hope to god we are moving past the age of 'everything's fast if you have enough machines' and 'money is not real' era of software development. I remember the point in my career when I moved from a cranky old .NET company, where we handled millions of users from a single cabinent's worth of beefy servers, to a cloud based shop where we used every cloud buzzword tech under the sun (but mainly everything was cont…

Tangential point but why is it that so often these leaving the cloud posts use the word "beefy" to describe the servers? It's always you don't need cloud because beefy servers handle pretty much any bla bla bla https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... If anyone from oxide computer or similar is reading, maybe you should rebrand to BEEFY server inc...

Because that is a casual word in the English language to describe an object with substantial power?

If you would suggest a word that would make a better substitute in this case, that could move the conversation forward, and perhaps you could improve the aesthetic quality of posts about leaving the cloud.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#550

Post by gervwyk »

ldoughty wrote: post #455
abenga wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This implies cloud infrastructure experts are cheaper than bare metal Linux/networking/etc experts. Probably in most smaller organizations, you have the people writing the code manage the infra, so it's an "invisible cost", but ime, it's easy to outgrow this and need someone to keep cloud costs in check within a couple of years, assuming you are growing as fast as an average start-up.

I think it's completely different ballparks to compare the skill sets... It is cheaper/easier for me to hire cloud infrastructure _capable_ people easier and cheaper than a server _expert_. And a capable serverless cloud person is MUCH cheaper and easier to find. You don't need to have 15 years of a Linux experience to read a JSON/YAML blob about setting up a secure static website.. of you need to figure out how to s…

This comment pretty much sums up this argument. Well said.

As with everything, choose the right tool for the job.

If it feels expensive or risky, make a u-turn, you probably went off the rails somewhere unless you’re working on bleeding edge stuff, and lbh most of us are not.

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