24 ms·

> If I want high availability I can just get 5 servers and have that much more compute available and I'd still end up paying less. Please give us an update her

> If I want high availability I can just get 5 servers and have that much more compute available and I'd still end up paying less. Please give us an update here when you are done building your hetzner beowulf cluster and let us know how it fares. I think you are grossly underestimating the system you describe.

brigadier132 2y ago
I don't want a cluster, I just want a load balancer that can connect users to the machine I want.
- iampims 2y ago
  If the LB is for HTTP traffic, check out Cloudflare’s offering.
zamadatix 2y ago
Whether this is completely out of the box or a multi-year engineering project to get equivalent levels of utility in the long term is completely up to how one specifically uses Fly.io. E.g. a load balancer in front of some relatively stateless http microservices is really not going to tie you to Fly.io because of complexity. A globally distributed edge compute environment with database, RPC, varying scaling patterns, and environment certifications is probably not going to have the value prop impacted by this kind of minor pricing change though.
- whalesalad 2y ago
  True, but managing 5 servers requires overhead. Where does the load balancer sit? What happens when it goes down? What if the entire datacenter loses comms? That is why cloud providers have AZ's that are physically separated from one another at different sites. When your boxes are spread across different physical networks, how do you connect them securely? For true HA you need a system that can self heal. Just throwing servers at the problem does not make things better. Reminds me of the expression 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month. None of this is impossible, but when you are a small startup it makes sense to offload this to someone else and not waste time reinventing the wheel.
  - ffsm8 2y ago
    For the record, hetzner cloud also has multiple data centers (at least in Europe, haven't checked for US) with sharedand load balancers . What you don't get is managed services like k8s, databases, sqs, lambda/faas. These are generally easy to setup via preconfigured Terraform or ansible scripts, but if something goes wrong, you'll have to look at the logs yourself - that's true. (But that's ignoring that such a small team as you're proposing would likely be better served with a more mundane setup, avoiding all of these extra points of failure you'll have to manage... Making a simple bare metal setup once again the less involved and better performing alternative)
    - everfrustrated 2y ago
      Hetzner load balancers don't have any auto scaling feature which is a pretty critical requirement for any load balancer product in 2024.
      - ffsm8 2y ago
        Im pretty sure you're vastly underestimating the amount of performance you get from today's hardware. You won't be a small team by the time you're at a scale to need horizontal scaling. Only the biggest consumer facing/social media sites get value from that.
        whalesalad 2y ago
        If you cannot tolerate downtime you need a redundant load balancer and you need nodes in different datacenters. Scale really doesn't matter in this equation. Now maybe you don't need five-nine's so then the risk is worth keeping it simple.
        ffsm8 2y ago
        Both of which hetzner has? Did you skip the previous comment entirely?
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
Hi, professional sysadmin here. I've run production deployments across hundreds of machines in Hetzner; it scales fine. The only real problem is that Hetzner is so much cheaper than anything else that it's easy to get a little bit stuck. (Honestly, that was a fun job in a lot of ways. Oh well.)
- whalesalad 2y ago
  Never said it couldn't be done. I forgot that they have ventured into the iaas space and are doing more than just dedicated boxes now. For a small startup with a simple app, managing five dedicated nodes and building your own orchestration on top of deployments, load balancing, networking etc feels like the juice ain't worth the squeeze. For their cloud offering, it is more compelling.

brigadier132 2y ago

I don't want a cluster, I just want a load balancer that can connect users to the machine I want.

iampims 2y ago
If the LB is for HTTP traffic, check out Cloudflare’s offering.

zamadatix 2y ago

Whether this is completely out of the box or a multi-year engineering project to get equivalent levels of utility in the long term is completely up to how one specifically uses Fly.io. E.g. a load balancer in front of some relatively stateless http microservices is really not going to tie you to Fly.io because of complexity. A globally distributed edge compute environment with database, RPC, varying scaling patterns, and environment certifications is probably not going to have the value prop impacted by this kind of minor pricing change though.

whalesalad 2y ago
True, but managing 5 servers requires overhead. Where does the load balancer sit? What happens when it goes down? What if the entire datacenter loses comms? That is why cloud providers have AZ's that are physically separated from one another at different sites. When your boxes are spread across different physical networks, how do you connect them securely? For true HA you need a system that can self heal. Just throwing servers at the problem does not make things better. Reminds me of the expression 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month. None of this is impossible, but when you are a small startup it makes sense to offload this to someone else and not waste time reinventing the wheel.
- ffsm8 2y ago
  For the record, hetzner cloud also has multiple data centers (at least in Europe, haven't checked for US) with sharedand load balancers . What you don't get is managed services like k8s, databases, sqs, lambda/faas. These are generally easy to setup via preconfigured Terraform or ansible scripts, but if something goes wrong, you'll have to look at the logs yourself - that's true. (But that's ignoring that such a small team as you're proposing would likely be better served with a more mundane setup, avoiding all of these extra points of failure you'll have to manage... Making a simple bare metal setup once again the less involved and better performing alternative)
  - everfrustrated 2y ago
    Hetzner load balancers don't have any auto scaling feature which is a pretty critical requirement for any load balancer product in 2024.
    - ffsm8 2y ago
      Im pretty sure you're vastly underestimating the amount of performance you get from today's hardware. You won't be a small team by the time you're at a scale to need horizontal scaling. Only the biggest consumer facing/social media sites get value from that.
      - whalesalad 2y ago
        If you cannot tolerate downtime you need a redundant load balancer and you need nodes in different datacenters. Scale really doesn't matter in this equation. Now maybe you don't need five-nine's so then the risk is worth keeping it simple.
        ffsm8 2y ago
        Both of which hetzner has? Did you skip the previous comment entirely?

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago

Hi, professional sysadmin here. I've run production deployments across hundreds of machines in Hetzner; it scales fine. The only real problem is that Hetzner is so much cheaper than anything else that it's easy to get a little bit stuck. (Honestly, that was a fun job in a lot of ways. Oh well.)

whalesalad 2y ago
Never said it couldn't be done. I forgot that they have ventured into the iaas space and are doing more than just dedicated boxes now. For a small startup with a simple app, managing five dedicated nodes and building your own orchestration on top of deployments, load balancing, networking etc feels like the juice ain't worth the squeeze. For their cloud offering, it is more compelling.