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AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

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Re: AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

#71
post #19

>While AWS and Azure are industry leaders, their advantages often only materialize at massive scales. [...] Your comparisons are similar to many others out there that focus on measuring basic cpu and memory. This type of easy comparison where AWS/Azure/GCP is treated as a "dumb" datacenter is easy for alternatives like Hetzner or self-hosting to "win". >Do you really need the advanced features of AWS and Azure right…

This. To add, if you every want to get ISO/PCIDSS etc certification done then good luck implementing gazillion check list items which Azure/AWS/GCP have already taken care of.

Which is bullshit, because the auditors ALWAYS miss stuff, even things I would think are painfully obvious. It’s a cottage industry that allows the C-Suite to assure investors that they have taken all necessary precautions, so when they get hacked they can point and say “we were certified!”

Re: AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

#72
post #50

Most cloud customers don't pay on-demand retail prices. For example, Azure VM Reservations or Savings Plans typically provide a 50-65% discount. AWS has similar plans. For example, instead of the ancient F8 series used in the article, a modern D8as_v5 Azure instance under a 3-year Savings Plan is $115/mo. Also, the article compares CPX41 to EC2 and Azure VMs with dedicated cores, not shared cores. The CCX33 Hetzner m…

I certainly can't dispute the other points...but to me the AWS Savings plan always felt like vendor lock-in...and sort of like a virtual "on prem", in that i have to commit to something for X amount of time (like old school provisioning hardware and have it live for X time), and then i lose the flexibility of what i thought *the cloud* in general was supposed provide: that is, freedom to scale up, down or *out*, etc.…

It's the result of MBA-driven enshittification.

"In the beginning" the clouds promised to use their scale to soak up your unpredictable demand. You as the customer didn't have to think about capacity, or planning ahead, budgets, opex, etc... Just swipe your credit card and go from zero to any number you please and back again at any time of your choosing. Because there are so many other customers using the cloud with you, the unpredictable nature of your individual usage is averaged out and the cloud vendor gets a (slightly) noisy but manageable usage level of their resources. They have to work a little harder to predict future capacity needs, but you pay a premium for this.

"A little later" the MBAs realise that they can squeeze 5% more profit out of their customers with lock-in contracts that make everything "nice and predictable" instead of the stochastic noise they had to "deal with" before. Getting rid of that makes things a lot harder for you as the customer, but they don't care. They care about that 5%.

Ta-da... we're back at having to "procure", we're back at budgets that have to be planned for 3 years in advance, we're back at having to have time machines.

Re: AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

#73
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can open a ticket and make the weirdest of issues with MSK Amazon’s problem to deal with. Same with RDS, etc. It’s pretty great not to waste time when the lottery for the bizarrest of 0.000001% issues arise. The operator only solves the happy path. An AWS support ticket usually can solve the unhappy path.

This has not been my experience at multiple companies with AWS, even with heavy spend – your tickets have to make it through a gatekeeper who has no more idea than you on how to fix it, and more triage than anything else.

I only have the opposite. Great support with amazingly deep knowledge at every level.

Re: AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

#74
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For free Not sure we agree on the meaning of this phrase in this context.

If you ever hit an issue with Kafka or Strimzi, go to their Slack, some of the most intelligent people I've ever had the privilege to work alongside will be there, helping you. For 0 money. That kinda free.

I would prefer to say "free of charge", because that support is not actually free, it has a cost, you're just not required to pay for it.

But you as well as I know, that what the other participant in this conversation means, is that if a for-profit entity relies on support that is "free of charge" in this way, such that it can continue to profit on the back of their product support, then the for-profit entity really ought to seriously consider a voluntary donation of some kind to support the continued maintenance and support of the product.

Re: AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, it's a false dichotomy you present, it's not a binary choice of fully managed or entirely roll your own. E.g., if you're running K8s (one thing I typically recommend you buy a managed one of), you can install your own Kafka in it, using an operator that does about 85% of what MSK does. Sure, you'll need to dedicate person hours to support the operator, but is supporting that any more expensive than sup…

It's also, what kind of startup are you? What kind of workload do you have? If you are bootstrapping a crud app business then 1 beefy hetzner box (or something slightly more reliable) with postgresql is probably fine until you reach scale where you sell the business. You care about burn rate above all. If you are VC backed go all in on gcp or aws because thats what you're expected to do and and what the expensive peo…

I agree but would slightly modify it in that if you have taken VC money, growth probably matters above all else. Don't waste time on activities not related to the product being sold.

Re: AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

#76
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly can't dispute the other points...but to me the AWS Savings plan always felt like vendor lock-in...and sort of like a virtual "on prem", in that i have to commit to something for X amount of time (like old school provisioning hardware and have it live for X time), and then i lose the flexibility of what i thought *the cloud* in general was supposed provide: that is, freedom to scale up, down or *out*, etc.…

It's the result of MBA-driven enshittification. "In the beginning" the clouds promised to use their scale to soak up your unpredictable demand. You as the customer didn't have to think about capacity, or planning ahead, budgets, opex, etc... Just swipe your credit card and go from zero to any number you please and back again at any time of your choosing. Because there are so many other customers using the cloud with…

Bleh and yuck! I'm finding myself nodding in agreement with all that you stated, but not feeling good about it because of the reality of things! :-)

Re: AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

#77
post #19

>While AWS and Azure are industry leaders, their advantages often only materialize at massive scales. [...] Your comparisons are similar to many others out there that focus on measuring basic cpu and memory. This type of easy comparison where AWS/Azure/GCP is treated as a "dumb" datacenter is easy for alternatives like Hetzner or self-hosting to "win". >Do you really need the advanced features of AWS and Azure right…

The caveat to this is, you might think you need RDS, SQS, SNS, S3, Lambda, DynamoDB, Elasticache and Kinesis - but you probably only need Postgres.

Re: AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, it's a false dichotomy you present, it's not a binary choice of fully managed or entirely roll your own. E.g., if you're running K8s (one thing I typically recommend you buy a managed one of), you can install your own Kafka in it, using an operator that does about 85% of what MSK does. Sure, you'll need to dedicate person hours to support the operator, but is supporting that any more expensive than sup…

It's also, what kind of startup are you? What kind of workload do you have? If you are bootstrapping a crud app business then 1 beefy hetzner box (or something slightly more reliable) with postgresql is probably fine until you reach scale where you sell the business. You care about burn rate above all. If you are VC backed go all in on gcp or aws because thats what you're expected to do and and what the expensive peo…

I really wonder whether a VC would rather invest into a startup with an architect focusing on KISS or one where the architect goes all in on cloud.

Re: AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

#79

AWS is like the tool I know. I pay roughly 30$ for a CaptainRover install running on Lightsail. Hetzner starts at 50 Euro, only has servers and Europe and is going to require a ton more work. AWS has the right idea, they give everyone who asks nicely thousands in free credits to get started. Then 2 years in your hooked. I don't want to learn a new system.

Hetzner does start at a much lower price point, and has servers also in Singapore and US (but only since a couple of months)

Re: AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

#80
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither Fargate nor App Runner scale to zero (unless something changed). So there is always a baseline cost of a few dollars.

Lambda container would be the closest equivalent with that functionality, https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/images-create.h...

Agreed. I ran a small GPT chatbot on Lambda through API Gateway with a dynamodb storage backend and don't recall incurring any cost (or if I did, was just pennies per month).
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