18 ms·

I know it's not in fashion, but I will suggest that renting physical servers is a very good and under-appreciated compromise. As an example, 45€/month gets you

• JaggerJo 4y ago
  I also self host on a 4$ box. Quite impressive how much performance you get for that kind of money. Setting up and managing Postgres is a pain tho. Would be nice to have a simpler way of getting this all right.
  • robertlagrant 4y ago
    My great hope is either fly.io or cloudflare providing managed postgres behind their super lightweight services and networking.
  • pepa65 4y ago
    That's what docker is for, making setup simpler.
    • baq 4y ago
      Getting binaries onto a box is not the hard part of administering a RDBMS
• yencabulator 4y ago
  On a cloud VM in a good cloud, using disaggregated storage: - physical hardware has trouble, e.g. fan failure -> my VM gets live migrated to a different host, I don't notice or care - physical hardware explodes -> my VM restarts on a different host, I might notice but I don't care Disaster planning is a lot easier with VMs (even with pets not cattle).
• sourcecodeplz 4y ago
  But then again you have to monitor the health of the drives as opposed to a VPS.
  • bell-cot 4y ago
    Ask in advance about who's responsible for hardware health monitoring, recommended tools for that, and how they handle hardware failures. Bonus - how they respond to such questions may separate the good providers of private rent-a-servers from the not-so-good ones.
    • toast0 4y ago
      Who faces the immediate consequences of failed hardware --- that's who needs to monitor it. Disk monitoring isn't too hard though. For hard drives, run smartctl once an hour, alert when reallocated or pending sectors grows quickly or hits 100. For SSDs, cross your fingers; in my experience with a few thousand, they tend to work great until they disappear from the bus, never to be seen again. Have a data recovery plan that doesn't involve storage of the data onto the same model devices with very similar power on hours --- power on hour correlated firmware errors are real.
  • k8sToGo 4y ago
    Not if you build a cluster with disposable nodes.
• zer0tonin 4y ago
  I actually agree with you, it's just a little bit more expensive. An under-appreciated thing with dedicated servers is that they often come with very solid network bandwith, which really helps for use cases like streaming audio/video.
• phpnode 4y ago
  I really don't understand why the industry seems to have lost sight of this. It's really common to see super complicated, incredibly expensive, but highly scalable cloud deployments for problems that can be trivially solved with one or two dedicated servers. Even the mere suggestion of renting a dedicated server provokes scorn from devops teams. The overall difference in cost when taking into account all of the complexity, feature-lag and general ceremony must be at least 10x and maybe even closer to 100x. It's madness.
  • adrianmsmith 4y ago
    I think it might be due to the incentives - the costs are borne by the company (thus irrelevant to the employee), however putting new cool technologies on their CV is very relevant to the employee.
    • bell-cot 4y ago
      > ...company...employee... Yes - but stupid yearnings to "do what all the cool kids are doing now" are at least as strong in those who would normally be referred to as "managers", vs. "employees".
      • adrianmsmith 4y ago
        Good point - and in the case of managers there's also the "nobody got fired for buying IBM" effect: outcome A) huge microservices/cloud spend goes wrong, well at least you were following best practices, these things happen, what can you do. outcome B) you went with a Hetzner server and something went wrong, well you are a fool and should have gone with microservices, enjoy looking for a new job. Thus encouraging managers to choose microservices/cloud. It might not be the right decision for the company, but it's the right decision for the manager, and it's the manager making the decision.
    • rr888 4y ago
      Agreed. I love our physical in house servers, but not knowing AWS in depth really hurt my last job search.
• shapefrog 4y ago
  I went the opposite direction at Hetzner with the last round of price hikes. I now use multiple of the Hetzner Cloud instances for my personal projects, for 1/4 of the price (most of the time) or for more if I am messing with something in particular. Peak performance is certainly worse - but I am not too bothered if something takes longer to run anyway. You are certainly correct on having as much automation in the provisioning of a server, something I did not do with a physical server.
  • MrGilbert 4y ago
    This. I used to have a root server for my pet projects, but honestly, that doesn't make sense. I'm not running a high traffic, compute intense SaaS on my machines. It's just a static website and some projects. I'm down to monthly costs of 24€, which includes a storage box of 1 TB to store all my data.
    • robertlagrant 4y ago
      Static website I like the combo of Git(Hub,Lab) Pages and Cloudflare fronting it for SSL/domain name. Nice and free, and if I want to move elsewhere it's also simple enough.
    • pepa65 4y ago
      You must have great and ultrareliable service. My monthly cost is just over $8 and I have one 1TB storage and one 2TB storage besides three little machines.
      • MrGilbert 4y ago
        Yepp, service availability is somewhat great.
• jayski 4y ago
  100% agree. AWS is very cost efficient for other services (S3,SES,SQS, etc) but virtual machines are not a good deal. You get less RAM & CPU, with the virtualization overhead, and pay a lot more money. Especially for Postgres if you run some tests with pgbench you can really see the penalty you pay for virtualization. Maybe the sysadmin skill of being able to build your own infrastructure is becoming a lost art, otherwise I can't explain why people are so in love with paying 5x for less performance. Hetzner is cheap and reliable in Europe, if you're in North America take a look at OVH. Especially their cost-saving alternative called SoYouStart. You can get 4/8 4.5ghz, 64 RAM and an NVME drive for $65. (I have no affiliation with OVH, I'm just a customer with almost 100 servers, and it's worked out great for me)
  • KyeRussell 4y ago
    AWS’s value proposition is dead simple to understand if you’ve actually used it. You said it yourself. AWS gets you through the door with their managed services, meta components (like billing and IAM), and whatever else. Saying even in a tongue in cheek way that people are in love with paying more for less raw power isn’t giving people enough credit. I know I could get a better cost per hertz elsewhere, or whatever. That’s not the whole equation.
    • shanebellone 4y ago
      I'm not sure if cloud has a valid value-proposition. The more I explore and build the more irrelevant it seems for the average developer. Besides price and performance being obvious concerns, it's also a platform. Working with it fundamentally ties your business to a set of products. Historically, this hasn't worked well for Internet businesses. Plus, all the benefits of cloud can be mirrored by traditional servers. Self-serve infrastructure appears likely to become increasingly viable as we continue improving last mile delivery and expand fiber access. Will cloud become self-cannibalizing? Definitely maybe.
      • Stranger43 4y ago
        That could have been true if the industry had not screwed up IPv6 and security so badly that it's actually rare for even good internet connections to expose their end users to full inbound internet traffic so it's actually harder to self host out of your basement today then it was 20 years ago because of the prevalence of ISP supplied hardware firewalls for todays consumer internet. What cloud gets you is the ability to put your data/workload right at the core without having to make special deals with your local isp, and with a lot more resilience then you would likely afford unless your at least at the multiple 20 foot container full of servers scale of compute need.
• dm 4y ago
  And with that computing power it's easy to install qemu-kvm and virtualise your own servers which is more scalable (and easier to move when the hardware you're renting becomes redundant) than having one or two monolithic servers with every conceivable piece of software installed, conflicting dependencies, etc. The biggest additional cost to this is renting more IPv4 addresses, which Hetzner charge handsomely for now that there are so few available.
• danjac 4y ago
  Hetzner is excellent value of money, especially if you are based in Europe.
  • kouteiheika 4y ago
    It can actually be an even better value if you are not based in Europe, because for certain countries they don't charge you VAT, so you effectively get everything ~20% cheaper.
    • andrejuseu 4y ago
      EU countries that has VAT codes pay 0% VAT from other EU countries with VAT codes. More info https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/taxation/vat/cross-border-vat/index_en.htm https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/taxation/vat/cross-bor...
• komali2 4y ago
  For me I'm wondering about ISP overhead. When I rent a VPS I'm more confident in their uptime and that all the funky dns shit I'm less confident in will just work. I run a home server as a hobby and I had to do all sorts of weird negotiating with my isp to make sure I always have uptime. Then my shitty modem that the isp refuses to let me replace randomly resets my forwarded ports once every 6 months or so. Etc just weird shit like that. I guess if I was investigating commercial options I'd have the "trunk" sorted at the office with a commercial isp solution, static IP, good IT hardware maybe, but from what I know at this exact moment if a client needed hosting I'd always go straight to renting a vps.
• nik736 4y ago
  That server does not come with ECC RAM!
  • coder543 4y ago
    The person at the top of the thread claimed €45/month, but the configuration they're describing actually seems to be €37/month. If you want ECC RAM, that appears to be €60/month, and it also steps up to a more powerful 8-core CPU. Regardless, if we're talking about a "full production environment and a duplicate staging/standby environment" (to quote the person you replied to), then €60/month * (2 or 3) is still dirt cheap compared to any startup's AWS bill that I've seen. Use cases vary, but I tend to agree that AWS/GCP/Azure is not the answer to every problem. For someone who can fit their application onto a $4 VPS, that's obviously going to be cheaper than anything bare metal, but the cloud scales up very expensively in many cases. Bare metal isn't the answer to every problem either, but a lot of people in the industry don't seem to appreciate when it can be the right answer.
• kumarvvr 4y ago
  This absolutely works, but this comes at a later stage, perhaps after an MVP has picked up ground. For a beginner, the cheapest ones get the work done. I am sure that as cloud computing evolves, these offering become more common. There is another aspect of cloud computing. The medium to large corporates, count cloud computing as single digit percentages on their cost calculations. This means that the decisions taken by managers and teams, often search for reliability and scalability (to be put on their presentations) rather than "is my setup costly or cheap".
• rakoo 4y ago
  I can use a 4$ VPS for my own personal cloud. I will never pay 45$ for that. There's a whole band of people who have the technical chops to self-host, or host little instances for their family/friends/association/hiking club. This small margin where you're ok to spend a little extra because you want to make it proper, but you can't justify paying so much and spend time doing hard maintenance. A small VPS, with a shared Nextcloud or a small website, is all that's needed in many cases.
  • codazoda 4y ago
    > host little instances for their family/friends/association/hiking club For this I even use a little Raspberry Pi 400 in my bedroom. https://joeldare.com/private-analtyics-and-my-raspberry-pi-400 https://joeldare.com/private-analtyics-and-my-raspberry-pi-4...
    • dmonitor 4y ago
      I would like to hide my IP address in case an internet rando wants to ddos, though
      • mynameisvlad 4y ago
        How realistic is this concern? Like actually? I’ve self hosted my own stuff for close to a decade now. Nobody has tried DDoSing my setup, because why would they? What benefit would they possibly get out of it? I would be pretty much the only person affected, and once they stop it wouldn’t take long to recover. There is little to no incentive to DDoS a personal box, let alone by a “internet rando”.
        • bruce343434 4y ago
          Having played games online: what they gain could be as stupid as "haha I inconvenienced you because you pissed me off"
          • mynameisvlad 4y ago
• duxup 4y ago
  I recall an HN user talking about their overly complicated cloud setup and … they found they could just do the job substantially faster on their local GPU.
• marcosdumay 4y ago
  Virtual servers scale down better. Whatever you create, will start with 0 users, and an entire real machine is completely overkill for that 0 load you will get. You upgrade your VPS into a pair of real machines, then into a small rented cluster, and then into a datacenter (if somebody doesn't undercut that one). All of those have predictable bills and top performance for their price.
  • BirAdam 4y ago
    Modern server hardware can hit very low power states at idle just like modern desktops can. Most servers are also headless, so you’re not wasting power on a GPU. This means that you’re looking at a lower power bill if you’re not doing much. Likewise, you usually pay most for egress, and at low traffic that’s not much of an issue. Physical hardware can scale down exceedingly well. The main thing I would argue is that one own the hardware rather than rent.
    • toast0 4y ago
      It's hard to scale down the cost to the range of $4/month. I've seen offers for rented dedicated severs in that price range, and it's Core2 and similar. Anything you own in a colo is going to be more per month too. When I had connections where I could pay for a static IP, that was usually $5/month. I'm now renting a pretty low end server, but it's $30/month. Way more everything that I need, but it's nice. And they didn't drop support for my OS while increasing prices to improve support or something. (Although I did have some initially flakey hardware that needed to get swapped)
    • bcrl 4y ago
      When colocating, contracts tend to pay for power at a fixed price based on provisioning (which has to be more than the max power that will be used). Power savings are generally irrelevant for the customer paying for colocation despite being a good thing for the data center.
• nevi-me 4y ago
  I was upset last week when I saw how much our managed Postgres service cost us at work. $800 for the month, it's storing around 32GB of data, and is allocated 4 CPU cores. Like you, I also run my services from a rented physical server. I used to use Versaweb, but their machines are too old. I didn't previously like Hetzner because I'd heard bad things about them interfering with what you're running. However, I moved to them in December when my Versaweb instance just died, probably SSD from old age. I'm now paying 50% of what I paid Versaweb, and I can run 6 such Postgres instances. Then it makes one wonder whether it's worth paying $700 of $800 for a managed service with a fancy cloud UI, automatic upgrades and backups, etc. For a 1 person show or small startup, I think not. Cheaper to use an available service and dump backups to S3 or something cheaper.
  • quickthrower2 4y ago
    Why is postgres particularly overpriced in clouds?
    • chazeon 4y ago
      I would suspect it’s because of memory. I remember years ago my cheap 512m mem vps is easily bottlenecked by pg’s memory usage. CPU is idle when idled, memory eat by pg does not get released. Scaling memory is not cheap. Memory is the “scarce” for cloud hosting.
    • margorczynski 4y ago
      Probably complexity + usually the most important data is there so companies are willing to pay the extra to have peace of mind
  • dachryn 4y ago
    for a startup, it might actually make more sense. Do you want to pay an engineer to setup the backups and monthly update cycle? Setup the alert monitoring? There is an implicit cost there. If its only one or two of those things, just take the managed services. If you start to scale, get an administrator type of employee to save on this
  • 4y ago
• BirAdam 4y ago
  I would actually say just invest in the hardware and count the asset depreciation on taxes. Further, “scaling” horizontally is rather easy if you properly separate functions into different servers. For example, a few really light machines running nginx (with fastcgi cache enabled, because yes) behind an haproxy machine, your PHP/Python/JS/Ruby machines behind your nginx machines, and your DB cluster with TiDB or something behind that. You’ve removed the overhead of the container systems and the overhead of the virtualization platform. You’re no longer sharing CPU time with anyone. You’re not experiencing as many context switches or interrupts. The cost is all upfront though. You will still pay for bandwidth and power, but over time your cost should be lower. The main issue in any scenario involving real hardware is that you need staff who are competent in both hardware and Linux/UNIX systems. Many claim to be on their resumes and then cannot perform once on the job (in my experience anyway). In my opinion, one of the major reasons for the explosion of the cloud world was precisely the difficulty in building and the financial cost of building such teams. Additionally, there is a somewhat natural (and necessary) friction between application developers and systems folks. The systems folks should always pushing back and arguing for more security, more process, and fewer deployments. The dev team should always be arguing for more flexibility, more releases, and less process. Good management should then strike the middle path between the two. Unfortunately, incompetent managers have often just decided to get rid of systems people and move things into AWS land. Finally, I would just note that cloud architecture is bad for the planet as it requires over-provisioning by cloud providers, and it requires more computer power overall due to the many layers of abstraction. While anyone project is responsible for little of this waste, the entire global cloud as an aggregate is very wasteful. This bothers me and obviously likely factors as an emotional bias in my views (so large amounts of salt for all of the above).
  • kkielhofner 4y ago
    Generally agree but in the US at least from a financial and accounting standpoint you can actually do better than the favored op-ex of cloud services with a Section 179[0] lease[1]. Caveat here, of course, is that you have to have income. The argument could be made you can develop a means to to rent physical servers pre-income, then, when it makes sense, you can either use standard depreciation -or- Section 179 on outright purchases and/or Section 179 leases. As an example, you can deploy an incredibly capable group of let's say four absolutely ridiculous completely over-provisioned $100k physical 1U machines in different colo facilities for redundancy. There are all kinds of tricks here for load balancing and failover with XYZ cloud service, DNS, anycast, whatever you want. You can go with various colo facilities that operate datacenters around the world, ship the hardware from the vendor to them, then provision them with Ansible or whatever you're into without ever seeing the facility or touching hardware. So now you have redundant physical hardware that will absolutely run circles around most cloud providers (especially for I/O), fixed costs like all you can eat bandwidth (that doesn't have the 800% markup of cloud services, etc) - no more waiting for the inevitable $50k cloud bill or trying to track down (in a panic) what caused you to exceed your configured cloud budget in a day instead of a month. Oh btw, you're not locking yourself into the goofy proprietary APIs to provision and even utilize services other than virtual machines offered by $BIGCLOUD. If you're doing any ML you can train on your own hardware or (or the occasional cloud) and run inference 24/7 with things like the NVIDIA A10. Continuous cloud rental for GPU instances is unbelievably expensive and the ROI on purchasing the hardware is typically in the range of a few months (or way ahead almost immediately with Section 179). As an example, I recently did a benchmark with the Nvidia A10 for a model we're serving and it can do over 700 inference requests/s in FP32 with under 10ms latency. With a single A10 per chassis across four healthy instances that's 2800 req/s (and could probably be tuned further). Then, if you get REALLY big, you can start getting cabinets and beyond. In terms of hardware failures as mentioned, all I can say is dual PS RAID-ed out, etc hardware is (in my experience) extremely reliable. Frankly having had multiple full cabinets of hardware in the past hardware failures were few and far between and hardware vendors will include incredibles SLAs for replacement. You notify them of the failure, they send a tech in < eight hours directly to the colo facility and replace the disk, PS, etc with the flashing light. My experience is one (good) FTE resource can easily manage this up to multiple cabinet scale. To your point, the current issue is many of these people have been snatched up by the big cloud providers and replaced (in the market) with resources that can navigate the borderline ridiculousness that is using dozens (if not more) products/services from $BIGCLOUD. I've also found this configuration is actually MUCH more reliable than most $BIGCLOUD. No more wondering what's going on with a $BIGCLOUD outage that they won't even acknowledge (and that you have absolutely no control over). Coming from a background in telecom and healthcare it's completely wild to me how uptime has actually gotten much worse with cloud providers. Usually you can just tell customers "oh the internet is having problems today" because they'll probably be seeing headlines about it but for many applications that's just totally unacceptable - and we should expect better. [0] - https://www.section179.org/section_179_deduction/ https://www.section179.org/section_179_deduction/ [1] = https://www.section179.org/section_179_leases/ https://www.section179.org/section_179_leases/
• dom96 4y ago
  In general I agree that physical servers are great, but I think it's important to note that for most people a $4/month VPS is more than enough. So actually 45€/month would be overkill in that case.
• antisceptic 4y ago
  How many nodes (droplets) do you spin up that you need Terraform? I do something similar but I use a single script to spin up the Digital Ocean side and then I complete the setup in Ansible (with an all-in-one master script, since the DO droplets are fetched with a handmade inventory plugin).
• limteary 4y ago
  This is too expensive compared to VPS for lots of personal and hobby use cases or minor side business. I've seen lots of less experienced people overpay for hetzner and similar when a $5-10 vps would've worked.
• cryptos 4y ago
  In 2015 I worked in a project where really big servers (lots of RAM, fast SSDs) where needed for large database. The client had preferred AWS, but the monthly bill would have been something like 30K Euros. So, they went with Hetzner for a few hundred bucks a month ...
  • sakopov 4y ago
    That sounds like managed (RDS) instance pricing.
• oauea 4y ago
  Just keep in mind your disk can get zapped at any time, so keep backups and use raid if possible.
  • dspillett 4y ago
    The whole VPS can go up in smoke fairly easily too, quite literally in some cases. There were a couple of small VPS providers hit buy the fire that took out one of OVH's data centres and either had no backups or had the backups on other machines in the same building. Heck, many cheap VPS providers don't have a reliable backup system at all, some are honest about it (and tell users to manage their own backups) and some are less so. Also remember that a small VPS provider will have low staff because the margins are low, so if there is any manual intervention needed to restore services when there is a hardware failure you might find spinning up a new VPS elsewhere, restoring your own backups¹, and switching over DNS, is faster than the hosting providers restore process. And their backups are often daily, with your own you may be able to efficiently manage much more frequent (hourly, or even perhaps near real-time if your apps are not write-intensive) snapshots. You aren't going to get a 1-hour max restore and 1-hour max data-loss guarantee for $4/month! Keep backups in any case. Preferably on another provider or at least in a different physical location. And, of course, test them. And if you are managing a good backup regime, and monitoring your data/app anyway, is monitoring drives a significant extra hardship? -- [1] in fact if you automate the restore process to another location, which I do for a couple of my bits, then you can just hit that button and update DNS when complete, and maybe allocate a bit more RAM+cores (my test mirrors are smaller than the live VMs as they don't need to serve real use patterns).
• hknmtt 4y ago
  the cloud is the golden cage. companies, and people, got sold on comfort and ease of use whilst trapping themselves into vendor lock-in environment that is the california hotel. when they realize the problem, they are too deep in the tech and rewriting their codebase would be too complex or expensive so they bite the expense and keep on doing what they are doing. constantly increasing their dependency and costs and never be able to leave. as you pointed out, bare metal is the way to go. is works the opposite of cloud - a bit more work at the beginning but a way lot less of expenses at the end.
• troupe 4y ago
  Once you know you are going to use the machine for a while, buying two used server (one for backup) and co-locating them somewhere breaks even pretty quickly.
• cpursley 4y ago
  How much time is spent managing all of this monthly (deploys, etc)?
  • bluehatbrit 4y ago
    Not the parent commenter but I do basically the same as them. It really depends how much you're hosting and how much you want the latest updates. If I didn't want to do any updates to the selfhosted stuff I could probably spend 0 time a month. Most of the stuff I selfhost is only available over my VPN anyway so security isn't a huge concern on those. Even if I did want to update, it's just a case of pulling the latest version into the docker-compose template and re-running the ansible playbook. Obviously if the upgrade requires more then so be it, but it's no different to any other setup work wise. Probably the only thing I _need_ to do which I do manually is test my backups. But I have a script for each project which does it so I just SSH on, run the one-liner, check the result and it's done. I do that roughly once a month or so, but I also get emails if a backup fails. So it can be no time at all. Usually it's probably 1-2 hours a month if I'm taking updates on a semi-regular basis. But that will scale with the more things you host and manage.
  • jwr 4y ago
    I don't see a difference between physical and VPS servers here. I manage everything using automated tools anyway. Why would this take longer for physical? In other words, the only difference is where the ansible inventory file comes from. Either it's a static list of IPs, or it comes from terraform.
• bluehatbrit 4y ago
  I do exactly this, using Hetzner as well. I was managing some side projects and self-hosting and the bill just seemed to creep up because the VPS's we never power enough to host. I started feeling the need to add more VPS's and then I started shopping around. In the end I got a similar deal and specs. I can do anything I want with it now and even with quite a few self hosted services and projects I'm still running at only about 10-15% capacity. If I want to spin up a new project or try out hosting something new it takes a couple minutes and I've got the scripts. Deployments are fast, maintenance is low, and I have far more for my money. For anyone who's interested this is the rough cut of what I'm using: * Ansible to manage everything * A tiny bit of terraform for some DNS entries which I may replace one day * restic for backups, again controlled by ansible * tailscale for vpn (I have some pi's running at home, nothing major but tailscale makes it easy and secure) * docker-compose for pretty much everything else
  • jwr 4y ago
    Your management tools are quite similar to what I use. Ansible, terraform for disaster recovery and development cloud systems, several approaches to backups (duplicity+gpg, rsync), ansible+docker for updating certs, VpnCloud for VPN, docker containers for various things. Main app is Clojure, so I run a native JVM. Database is fully distributed, RethinkDB, now working on moving to FoundationDB. The important thing is not to manage anything manually, e.g. treat physical servers just like any other cloud server. It shouldn't matter whether it's physical or virtualized.
• Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  I've been on a physical server for years, but the problem is wear & tear and eventually they will shut down forever; unless you're willing to set up backups and a recovery plan for physical hardware failure, I'd stick with a VPS for now. I used a VPS before that, but stopped and switched to a physical one because it was a better deal and we didn't run into CPU limit(ation)s.
  • jwr 4y ago
    Hmm. But every server goes down eventually. What's the difference whether it's a VPS or a physical one? I don't assume anything about my physical servers.
• JSavageOne 4y ago
  I'm not a devops guy but I had to manage our Ansible deployment at one of my first jobs and always despised it. Scripts that would work locally would often not work on the Ansible deployment, and it was hard to debug. The other engineer (don't think he had experience with it either prior to the job) also felt the same way. I was more of a junior dev at the time so maybe I was an idiot, but I don't miss it at all. In theory I agree with what you're saying, but deploying a Dockerfile to something like Google Cloud Run is just a hell of a lot easier. Yea I'm paying more than what I would be managing my own VPS, but I think this is more than offset by the dev hours saved.
• intelVISA 4y ago
  What if, hypothetically, there was a tool that combined Terraform and Ansible and was native/performant rather than scripted?
• Spooky23 4y ago
  Usually the issue is that on-prem is seen as legacy and gets legacy budget and talent. Bigger companies are going to stick to a couple of big providers who don’t sell/rent iron. My employer adopted cloud as a business/financial play, not a religious one. We often land new builds in the cloud and migrate to a data center if appropriate later. The apps on-prem cost about 40% less. Apps that are more cost effective in cloud stay there.
• SergeAx 4y ago
  The problem with bare metal is quite sophisticated contingency plan for physical failure. With VMs when any one of them fails - you just re-run your Terraform/Ansible scipts, restore backup (if it was a stateful VM that failed) and voila, you are up and running again in minutes.
  • kuschku 4y ago
    Why would it be any different with rented bare metal? I can just run my terraform script against any one and be up and running in less than 2 minutes.
    • SergeAx 4y ago
      You have to provision a new server first, preferably the same or better configuration. And then restore all backups, because probably all your components didn't scale beyond one server yet.
      • kuschku 4y ago
        No? Terraform can do all of that for me. I can order (and get it delivered), install, configure, and restore from backup with terraform in less than 2 minutes. Hetzner has an API for ordering dedicated servers after all, and an API for installing an OS (or for rebooting to rescue and flashing whatever image you want)
• ska 4y ago
  > and cost more. for the same spec, sure. I think virtuals make sense at both ends - either dynamic scalability for large N is important, or you only actually need a small fraction of a physical box. Paying 45/mo for something that runs find on 5/mo isn't sensible either, and gives you more flexibility for not ganging things together just to use your server.
• klodolph 4y ago
  Hijacking this—what are the main options here? I found pricing for Hetzner and OVH dedicated / bare metal instances easily enough, but I found it a little difficult to find information about other providers.
• FpUser 4y ago
  >"I know it's not in fashion, but I will suggest that renting physical servers is a very good and under-appreciated compromise. " Exactly what I do for myself and my clients. Saves tons of dosh.
• lallysingh 4y ago
  I think 5 reasons: 1. Forces config to be reproducible, as VMs will go down. 2. You can get heavy discounts on AWS that reduce the pain. 3. The other stuff you have access to atop the VMs that's cheaper/faster once your stuff is already in the cloud 4. Easier to have a documented system config (e.g. AWS docs) than train people/document what special stuff you have in-house. Especially useful in hiring new folks. 5. You don't need space or redundant power/internet/etc on premesis. Just enough to let people run their laptops.
• ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
  This is what I do for all my companies. We have a $4 million profit this year.
• closeparen 4y ago
  That's a great option when you need servers in Europe. Hetzner offers cloud products only in its US datacenters, and as far as I know there are no dedicated server providers in the US with comparable pricing. I think it's the case that AWS/GCP/Azure are not very cost-competitive offerings in Europe. What I'm not seeing is evidence of that for the US.
• systems_glitch 4y ago
  Don't discount your local colo, either. I pay $75/month for 2U, a gigabit Ethernet link to a router two hops from the metro SONET ring in Albany, NY, and 1 mbps 95th percentile bandwidth. I've got a router, a switch, and a 1U 32-core AMD Bulldozer box in there hosting VMs (it's past due for replacement but running fine). Yes, you're supporting your own hardware at that point. No, it's not a huge headache.