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Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

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Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#571

Post by vicarrion »

jwr wrote: post #76
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 actually benchmarked this and wrote an article several years back, still very much applicable: https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-...

I also did a benchmark between cloud providers recently and compared performance for price

https://dillonshook.com/postgres-cloud-benchmarks-for-indie-...

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#572

Post by bluedino »

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.

Even if you can get instant approval, Dell or HP won't Fedex you 50 servers next day like they will 50 laptops.

And once you're a customer you get to deal with sales channels full of quotes and useless meetings and specialists. You can't just order from the website.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#573

Post by bluedino »

jiggawatts wrote: post #569
hibikir wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Running away from internal IT works until they inevitably catch up to the escapees. At $dayjob the time required to spin up a single cloud VM is now measured in years. I’ve seen projects take so long that the cloud vendor started sending deprecation notices half way through for their tech stacks but they forged ahead anyway because it’s “too hard to steer that ship”. The current “runners” are heading towards SaaS pla…

> At $dayjob the time required to spin up a single cloud VM is now measured in years.

We have a Service Now ticket that you can complete that spins the server up at completion. Kind of an easy way to do it.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#574

Post by jiggawatts »

bluedino wrote: post #573
jiggawatts wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running away from internal IT works until they inevitably catch up to the escapees. At $dayjob the time required to spin up a single cloud VM is now measured in years. I’ve seen projects take so long that the cloud vendor started sending deprecation notices half way through for their tech stacks but they forged ahead anyway because it’s “too hard to steer that ship”. The current “runners” are heading towards SaaS pla…

> At $dayjob the time required to spin up a single cloud VM is now measured in years. We have a Service Now ticket that you can complete that spins the server up at completion. Kind of an easy way to do it.

Then you end up with too-large servers all over the place with no rhyme or reason, burning through your opex budget.

Also, what network does the VM land in? With what firewall rules? What software will it be running? Exposed to the Internet? Updated regularly? Backed up? Scanned for malware or vulnerabilities? Etc…

Do you expect every Tom, Dick, and Harry to know the answers to these questions when they “just” want a server?

This is why IT teams invariably have to insert themselves into these processes, because the alternative is an expensive chaos that gets the org hacked by nation states.

The problem is that when interests aren’t forced to align — a failure of senior management — then the IT teams become an untenable overhead instead of a necessary and tolerable one.

The cloud is a technology often misapplied to solve a “people problem”, which is why it won’t ever work when misused in this way.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#575

Post by OutOfHere »

vidarh wrote: post #556
OutOfHere wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maxing out a CPU for a day or a week doesn't count. It has to stay maxed out close to for a month, maybe more. There are no "fair" terminations except without a court order. You will understand when it happens to you. Also, there is no way for you to determine if a report of a a termination is "unfair". In this way, you will continue reveling in your limited worldview. I have seen this multiple times with German prov…

I notice you've avoided addressing the issue of whether you were on a shared instance, where the point very much is that they're not meant for workloards that will pin the resources on an ongoing basis. On the dedicated servers they won't know whether you max it out or not. That you're being evasive makes it very much sound like you used them in ways you should have expected would be treated accordingly. If you've ru…

I have not run into this multiple times. You said that, not me. I said something different. Hetzner is the only cloud provider that cut me off. The other provider was not a cloud vendor.

Even if it was a shared instance, people don't hire a 48 core server just to use 1 or 2 cores. It makes no sense to rent out a big shared server and then expect users to not use it. Someone would rent it out only if they have exhausted smaller instances.

Something tells me that your idea of computing is communist computing, where someone shouldn't use too much even when paying for it. That's a mental roadblock for which there is no fix.

Someone with your communist mental model would be okay a cloud provider spying on their activities very closely, but most people are not.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#576

Post by benjiro »

mrinterweb wrote: post #523
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…

One thing that frustrates me with estimating performance on AWS is that I have to dramatically estimate down from the performance of my dev laptop (M2 MBP). I've noticed performance tradeoffs around 15x slower when deployed to AWS. I realize that's a anecdotal number, but this is a fairly consistent trend I've seen at different companies running on cloud hosting services. One of the biggest performance hits is latenc…

> It is network latency.

People do not realize for that fancy infinite storage scaling, that it means that AWS etc run network based storage. And that, like on a DB, can be a 10x performance hit.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#577

Post by hunvreus »

alberth wrote: post #186

There's a value curve for infrastructure, I'll use an analogy... Low Cost High Cost ============================================================== FARM WHOLESALER GROCERY RESTAURANT DOORDASH BUILD CO-LOCATION HETZNER AWS VERCEL While it's not a perfect analogy, in principle it holds true. As such, it should come as no surprise that eating at a restaurant every day is going to be way more expensive.

I love that, I may steal it.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#578

Post by Terretta »

wltr wrote: post #278
Terretta wrote: post #225

AWS and DigitalOcean*: $559.36, Hetzner: $132.96 Perspective: this difference is one hour of US fintech engineer time a month. If you have to self-build a single thing on Hetzner you get as "built-in" on AWS, are you ahead? If this is your price range, and you're spending time thinking about how to save that $400/month (three Starbucks a day) instead of drive revenue or deliver client joy, you likely shouldn't be on…

I’d like to point that exaggerations like $430 an hr (isn’t some average salary) or three Starbucks a day being something everyone casually does, they weaken your point. As the rest of your comment, personally, I see it more like a pitch to use AWS, rather than some conversion whether everyone really needs that enterprise tier. Me, I’d prefer to control as much of my infra as possible, rather than offloading it to ot…

OK, call it a half day (four hours) a month.

But really, if DIY, someone's got to actually have it meet SLOs and SLAs. So you need a person or two, which is when those hours add up.

These days housing and benefiting an employee can cost 50% to 100% overhead, depending on firm efficiency. So, $400/hr means $800k/yr (because 40 hrs x 50 weeks = rate x 2000) but half that can be considered overhead (recruiting, real estate, benefits, training, vacation, "management" when some number of headcount requires adding a lead or manager who is expensive overhead), so it's really 400k a year which is not out of line at firms with regulatory requirements.

Anyway, if your workload is critical, you can't have only one, so call it 2 at 200k. Point is, when all these things matter, GCP/Azure/AWS isn't the thing that stands out.

---

> As the rest of your comment, personally, I see it more like a pitch to use AWS

Re AWS, I thought I was clear:

If YAGNI, don't choose it.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#579

Post by trollied »

vanviegen wrote: post #152
CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but after over a week of trying to diagnose the issue and convince them that it wasn't an problem That sucks big time :( In the most recent case I can recall, I successfully got access, noticed weirdness, gathered data and sent an email, and had a new instance within 2-3 hours. Overall, based on comments here on HN and otherwhere, the quality and speed of support is really uneven.

> based on comments here on HN and otherwhere, the quality and speed of support is really uneven. Can you name one tech company that's scaled passed the point where the founders are closely involved with support that has consistently good tech support? I think this is just really hard to get right, as many customers are not as knowledgeable as they think they are.

It's not hard to get right. It's expensive to get right. And that affects pricing and profitability. You have to have a threshold.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

#580

Post by bluedino »

jiggawatts wrote: post #574
bluedino wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At $dayjob the time required to spin up a single cloud VM is now measured in years. We have a Service Now ticket that you can complete that spins the server up at completion. Kind of an easy way to do it.

Then you end up with too-large servers all over the place with no rhyme or reason, burning through your opex budget. Also, what network does the VM land in? With what firewall rules? What software will it be running? Exposed to the Internet? Updated regularly? Backed up? Scanned for malware or vulnerabilities? Etc… Do you expect every Tom, Dick, and Harry to know the answers to these questions when they “just” want a…

Those are all checkboxes on the form

The first time you do it, you can do a consult with a cloud team member

And of course they get audited every quarter so usage is tracked

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