7 ms·

I got everything off the cloud and am paying less

62 points by baxtr 2y ago

sph 2y ago
I wonder if there is some major propaganda push on HN to discourage actual software engineers from ever running their servers. Judging from the comments in this and similar posts, sounds like it is common belief that it's super expensive and a full time job to run bare metal services. AWS and GCP free credits have created a generation of developers that think running a webserver, a webapp and a database is rocket science, and when stuff breaks the whole company might go bankrupt because no one could ever save a corrupted database. Now a company with thousands of server should probably leverage big cloud offerings, but when we see a post that someone is able to save 10x by going bare metal, and they don't seem to be running a large operation, we should celebrate that, rather than parrot that it is a bad idea, oh god what have you done, no one will ever be able to run servers on their own, it's not worth it. For comparison, I manage half a dozen servers for clients and I literally do 1 hour of maintenance a year.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  I have a 10kW 4090 training cluster in my garage with water cooling. It paid itself back in 3 months if I'd used AWS services.
  - alanfranz 2y ago
    Not something that requires HA, backups, scaling, auditing, logs, security, and such, though. Would you run your prod inference cluster the same way?
    - llm_trw 2y ago
      It's little brother is the prod inference cluster. It's had an uptime of 100% over the last two years. People seriously don't realize just how _big_ computers have gotten. The AWS mentality is still stuck in 2005 when a t2.micro was a decent computer.
      - Dunedan 2y ago
        > The AWS mentality is still stuck in 2005 when a t2.micro was a decent computer. The T2 EC2 instance family got announced in 2014: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/startups/announcing-amazon-ec2-t2/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/startups/announcing-amazon-ec2-...
        llm_trw 2y ago
        The first instance was the m1.small it's specs are marginally better than those of t2.micro, it's not been generally available since 2022 if memory serves. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-instance-history/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-instance-history/ https://instances.vantage.sh/aws/ec2/t2.micro https://instances.vantage.sh/aws/ec2/t2.micro https://instances.vantage.sh/aws/ec2/m1.small https://instances.vantage.sh/aws/ec2/m1.small Please nitpick better. Nothing is more embarrassing then being pedantic and wrong.
        rcxdude 2y ago
        And t2.micro was not a decent computer at that time.
    - apitman 2y ago
      You don't need most of that until you're making enough money to hire someone to worry about it.
  - sulandor 2y ago
    is that enough to heat your house in the winter?
- apitman 2y ago
  It's weird how certain everyone is that it would take a ton of time to maintain. I mean, maybe. Depends on what you're running.
  - ghomem 2y ago
    People want simple answers. "It depends" annoys everyone :-\
- bryanrasmussen 2y ago
  In my experience running AWS etc. is something that takes at least one dev who is a subject matter expert, so it doesn't seem like it would be at all problematic to have the same thing for bare metal - a dev who is the SME on the bare metal. Also if you have everything ready to push to a cloud provider in the case of the server going down, someone like Vercel or Netlify (easier to maintain than AWS in my experience) then I guess you are pretty setup.
- Cpoll 2y ago
  Disagreeing with your thesis isn't propaganda. If anything, you could argue the tweet is propaganda, because the labels for the AWS bar chart is missing. (Not that I think that's what's happening). Hetzner nodes aren't actually 10x cheaper than AWS instances, so there's stuff like bandwidth usage going on. My point being there's no silver bullet, sometimes cloud makes sense and sometimes it doesn't.
  - earnesti 2y ago
    Yeah, hetzner nodes aren't 10x cheaper, because the products are not comparable. AWS/cloud services innovation is that their offering is incomparable and setup in a way which makes comparison very difficult. It is not only the hardware cost that saves you money, but also the fact that if you rent dedicated servers you tend to develop your infra in a different way which is ultimately way more cost effective. Dedicated servers definitely aren't a silver bullet, nobody is saying that. Managing your own servers requires work - how much, that is arguable and depends on many factors. To me the problem is more that AWS and cloud companies are selling a very expensive silver bullet, which really isn't even a silver bullet. In my experience most of the time it doesn't make sense to buy that.
    - Cpoll 2y ago
      I often find myself in a mid-size situation that's awkward. Hetzner doesn't provide SLAs, so if I have to then I need to run my clusters across multiple providers. If I need to support full DR in 8hrs I need to have something on another data center, I can't just run my AWS terraform in a different region. If my infra were 10x larger I'd go dedicated, but right now I'm happy enough to eat the AWS premium. > develop your infra in a different way Totally agree, but for many people that ship has sailed.
      - dijit 2y ago
        > Hetzner doesn't provide SLAs They do if you enter an agreement with them for professional services; I'm not certain but I think there's an SLA also on their "managed" servers: https://www.hetzner.com/managed-server/ https://www.hetzner.com/managed-server/ However, if you want a "no-human" SLA with bare-metal rented servers, I could recommend Gcore: https://gcore.com/hosting/dedicated https://gcore.com/hosting/dedicated Their managed kubernetes even supports bare-metal nodes, which is actually something I'm using.
- cjfd 2y ago
  I think so. People create and/or sell new technologies. Then they try to market them. For instance, by writing articles exaggerating the advantages and/or downplaying the disadvantages. Then this get picked up by other folks who want something new and interesting to write about. And suddenly there is a new and hot thing even if there are lots of cases where it does not help.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  >sounds like it is common belief that it's super expensive and a full time job to run bare metal services. Remember the age old saying: Time is money. If you run your own servers, you are spending your own time and thus money to manage them. If you buy services from hosting ("cloud") providers, you spend money to have someone else manage them. The question then becomes: Do you value your time or your money more? And then you pick the one that spends the one you value less. Some people value their time, some people value their money. YMMV.
  - sph 2y ago
    Your comment doesn't take into account that some things cost more than others, and might be not worth it their price. Running a server by yourself isn't more time consuming than having AWS do it for you. The issues that cause very long downtimes are flooding of the server room, subpar connectivity, low quality hardware, CPU is on fire. Just do not host your production services in your basement. Any VPS saves you from these, at 1/10th the AWS cost. This is obvious to anyone that has the basic skills to run a Linux host. The fact that it needs to be spelled out means that these days few have the skills and/or the others have been convinced that it is "a waste of time" and "makes only sense if your time is worthless" which is total FUD.
    - Dalewyn 2y ago
      I've realized that my time only becomes more valuable as I get older, to the point that if a problem can be solved by just throwing more money at it then that is a very compelling solution. Sure, buying a VPS or whatever from a hosting provider might be cheaper than buying a full blown cloud solution, but at what personal time cost? Time is a finite resource, much more than most of us ever realize. Worse, time is a resource that cannot be replenished. Money, on the other hand, is a replenishable and theoretically infinite resource. Sometimes, paying big bucks for premium services is the cheaper solution to moving on in life.
      - jgb1984 2y ago
        It takes me more time to find what I need in the infernal hell hole of an AWS web interface, try to understand their hopelessly complex jungle of lingo and abstraction layers. Hell, I'll deploy a fresh Hetzner bare metal server with Debian in a matter of 3-4 minutes and roll with it. 10 times more bang for your buck, no vendor lock in, and guess what: I am in control. I know what runs on my server. I understand the platform inside out. I don't trust developers who are afraid of setting up their own Linux server.
- fileeditview 2y ago
  > I wonder if there is some major propaganda push on HN to discourage actual software engineers from ever running their servers. Judging from the comments in this and similar posts, sounds like it is common belief that it's super expensive and a full time job to run bare metal services. AWS and GCP free credits have created a generation of developers that think running a webserver, a webapp and a database is rocket science, and when stuff breaks the whole company might go bankrupt because no one could ever save a corrupted database. Related to this observation you really should watch DHHs keynote talk at Rails World 2024 from about minute 20 to 30: https://youtu.be/-cEn_83zRFw?t=1296 https://youtu.be/-cEn_83zRFw?t=1296 He addresses exactly this phenomenon. EDIT: changed URL to include timestamp to the start of the relevant content.
- ghomem 2y ago
  >I wonder if there is some major propaganda push on HN to discourage actual >software engineers from ever running their servers How to scare a computer engineer in 2024? Invite him to configure a server.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- hagbard_c 2y ago
  I thing this is partly the result of people simply parroting shallow statements concerning 'backup, availability, disaster recovery,...' they've read or heard elsewhere, partly the result of a general push towards a service economy where it is considered smart to outsource to 'the experts'. While this may make sense in some cases - e.g. those where the task at hand is not recurring and requires knowledge or equipment which is not at hand and hard/expensive to come by - it is often more expensive and less flexible than just doing the thing yourself. Of course HN is a site frequented by people who are wont to start those same service companies so it is not surprising for there to be a tendency to play up the 'risks' of doing things yourself instead of 'leaving it to the experts'.
alanfranz 2y ago
The cloud is so incredibly good. But it’s expensive. This setup seems quite a maintenance hell. Let’s see what happens to his SLAs.
- sshine 2y ago
  His SLAs are probably fine. The hidden cost is the time he spends. However, if running computers are your business, spending time on getting money is called having a job.
  - lamontcg 2y ago
    > The hidden cost is the time he spends. Everyone seems to think that managing AWS is free.
xela79 2y ago
it really depends on the scope of what you run in the cloud and what kind of support/uptime you expect/require. if you're going to run your own servers with same level of support it will definitely be much higher than $120/month but this is, alas, not the tech issue, but a more low level understanding the reasoning of why cloud is more interesting for certain use cases, and on prem better for other. it is definitely not a one solution fits all edit: https://rameerez.com/how-i-exited-the-cloud/ https://rameerez.com/how-i-exited-the-cloud/ oh wait, he did not get anything "off the cloud" he is still running on a "cloud" based solution, just a different company. LOL
klipklop 2y ago
This is a hilariously small deployment. Anybody that assumes bare metal is easy at scale has not had to build out and cool data centers. Heck even designing and keeping the hvac running properly requires expertise. Same with powering all this stuff. One electrical fried rat in the right place can really ruin your weekend. I still believe running your own servers is cheaper but there is a tun of logistics you don’t want to really deal with.
- hanikesn 2y ago
  Did you ever hear of colocation, root servers and VPSs?
- jgb1984 2y ago
  It's weird how the same straw man argument comes back when this topic is discussed. As if the only two options in the world are cloud and on-premises bare metal. While the best solution is often to simply rent a bare metal server from any of the big hosting providers like Hetzner. They take care of cooling, physical security, hardware failures, network infrastructure etc. All you have to do is manage the server. Which isn't more or less work than managing the horror that is AWS (just 1000x more enjoyable in my opinion) while getting 10 times more bang for your buck.
- dijit 2y ago
  I ran 1% of Web Traffic in 2011 without running my own datacenter. Our "platform" team was 6 people, two network engineers and four "devops" (Sysadmins that could write code, but were still called SysAdmins then). We had two datacenters, one was SAVVIS in Winnersh Triangle, the other was in Santa-Clara USA. We used remote hands- rarely- in the event that a cable died or a harddisk needed to be replaced, though such events are exceptionally rare even at the scale we had. Mostly we would collect up failures and visit one day every 3 months.
- orev 2y ago
  The vast majority of applications are “hilariously small deployments” and only use the cloud or k8s because the engineer wants that on their resume. And there’s a huge range of sizes between “hilariously small” and “needs a whole data center”. This conversation always seems to assume everything is and needs to be Google-scale.
DoingIsLearning 2y ago
Aside from the 'it's a cargo cult' discussion, when we start dissecting these technical merits we often miss the business angle of __Accountability__. This is exactly the reason why you see Fortune 500 companies paying millions to external consultants for what seem to be fairly trivial advisory/decision making tasks. If you are running something big enough and business critical enough and you roll your own custom _anything_, even if you save a gazillion, you are a hero for the next quarter. But if your custom solution goes fubar you are packing your boxes. The effort/time/cost of managing/configuring cloud anything is negligible if it allows people in companies where Software is a cost centre to deflect liability if something goes fubar. It's pretty much the revamped 21st century version of the 80's meme "nobody got fired for buying IBM". Nobody will get fired at big corp for going all in on Azure or AWS. Look at CrowdStrike's cluster fuck, there were zero heads rolled for using the cloud services impacted by it. The very opposite would be true if it happened on bare metal servers. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, carry a 'too big to go wrong' halo with them (at least in public discourse) and that just sells.
- growse 2y ago
  The flip side of this is control. If s3 goes down, and therefore your service is down, there's little you can do about it whilst your customers are screaming at you.
  - api 2y ago
    Yes but you can blame S3. I think the OP had a major point. In large organizations the incentive is to have someone to blame that is not you.
    - growse 2y ago
      If I was paying a large amount of money for a service that was then down, and then the vendor just shrugged with "s3 is down, nothing I can do", I'd be re-tendering that very day.
      - api 2y ago
huksley 2y ago
His setup is pretty uncomplicated: - database (postgres) - redis cache - webserver How to exit the cloud (aka run everything in VPS) if you also need this? - reliable and scalable block storage - queue / task management - trusted email-sending provider Not questioning the trend, just seriously interested in finding solutions to this.
- betaby 2y ago
  > His setup is pretty uncomplicated Like the of the AWS deployed sites.
y0ned4 2y ago
Using the cloud = losing your know-how + gaining vendor lock-in
- betaby 2y ago
  Some people even say 'cloud == deskilling'.
chadcmulligan 2y ago
Its probably the beginning of the next phase in the we should centralise everything/no thats bad - lets decentralise everything cycle. The 'one stop shop' idea describes it pretty well https://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/onestopshop.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/onestopshop.asp
Heloseaa 2y ago
Too scared to ask, but isn't it still the cloud ? The OP is just not using managed services anymore, which is obviously less expensive. I always thought that all kind of servers in datacenters could be defined as cloud server.
- dijit 2y ago
  "Cloud" is hyperscalers and managed services. The idea was, I think, related to network diagrams that showed everything outside of your own border as a cloud icon. (IE; very foggy and unknown). It never really made much sense, but normally what seems to separate a MSP/service or colocation is the availability of managed object storage and an abstraction on the network. However, now it seems to have been coopted and now means basically anything that isn't in your closet. However we ran many physical machines we paid for in colocation facilities, and when AWS was coming up there was an understanding that "that's not what the cloud is" among the masses. Despite managing them over the internet. So, a fuzzy term has become more fuzzy. So much for us being "engineers".
ghomem 2y ago
Yeah, the Emperor's New Clouds. Sometime ago I thought I was crazy and everybody else was right :-) but now we are seeing more and more people doing the numbers. https://logical.li/blog/emperors-new-clouds/ https://logical.li/blog/emperors-new-clouds/ I wonder, though, why the topic is so contentious. This is supposed to be an engineering discipline, not a fight between religions.
- xenospn 2y ago
  First time on HN?
- lamontcg 2y ago
  You could do configuration management in the 90s with rdist well enough on 100 servers. The problem with IT in the early 2000s was that IT departments were shoveling money to companies like VMWare and EMC and overbuilding all their hardware. Amazon built everything on commodity hardware and open source and didn't have vendors acting like financial boat anchors on their scalability. IT departments also usually had massive amounts of friction and gatekeeping to getting anything done, and you needed a design review meeting to spin up a single server for someone. And really I think it was elimination of that centralized control and bureaucracy that made cloud computing so popular.
vandyswa 2y ago
This discussion is interesting, but I'm always cautious viewing discussion when an argument contrary to the interests of a very, very, very large industry are in play.
erik_seaberg 2y ago
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41723600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41723600
jmstfv 2y ago
if you're running a small operation, as I do, there aren't many reasons to use Big Cloud. i've been running my tiny business on the same provider as op for more than a year, and i've done very little maintenance to keep things up and running. granted, you need to set things up the first time, but after that, it just keeps chugging along.
throwaway2016a 2y ago
Reading through these comments I'm not sure everyone is on the same page as to what "Cloud" actually is. In both the Twitter thread and the HN comments people seem to think VPS in no longer "cloud". IMO you are not "off the cloud" unless you own the hardware. A VPS is not that much different than an EC2 instance. So in reality you just converted from cattle to pets[1] while just being on a different type of cloud. And once you get into actual colocation you have to buy the hardware, have redundancy, and the colocation facility is probably charging you quite a bit (and perhaps even extra for bandwidth and power consumption). [1] "cattle" refers to a disposable and easily replaceable resource, like virtual machines or containers, while "pets" are unique, carefully tended servers that are individually managed and not easily replaceable.
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
Paying less is only one potential benefit. Another, arguably more important, guaranteed benefit is control. For me control is the number one issue with computers today. Not cost, not features, not convenience or anything else. "Cloud" computing has been defined as "someone else's computer". Bloggers and other pundits have also cited a "war on general purpose computing". These complaints, and others, to me, are summarised by the issue of control.
Davereye99 2y ago
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stellaglenn77 2y ago
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henrynoah2025 2y ago
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DeathArrow 2y ago
Story is here: https://rameerez.com/how-i-exited-the-cloud/ https://rameerez.com/how-i-exited-the-cloud/
- asterios33 2y ago
  The fact that this guy is using GP2 EBS volumes right off the bat makes me question his AWS savvy. If he’d optimized from the start in the cloud, the story could have been about ‘How I Saved 2x on Monthly Infrastructure Costs,’ with a meaningful discussion around trade-offs and architecture choices. Instead, he’s running an idle server, consuming 400W like it’s still 2007
  - apitman 2y ago
    You say that as if AWS pricing isn't designed to be confusing in order to get people to spend more money. There are people who do nothing but consult on AWS because it's so complicated. I don't want to learn AWS, I want to build things.
  - skrebbel 2y ago
    > his AWS savvy It seems to me that at this point, being an AWS customer is about as difficult as running a server manually. It's just different skills. The risk of running your own servers is certain kinds of downtime may be harder to fix (though if you have some "sysadmin savvy", ie, backups, it shouldn't be much), and the risk of being an AWS customer is accidentally paying 10x what you should.
  - cjs_ac 2y ago
    Until recently, the AWS pricing page had no prices on it. (Or, if it did have prices, I couldn't find them.)
xnorswap 2y ago
Where "10x less money" is still less than the cost of a single developer. If this needs any extra work then it's just been busy work and change for the sake of it. I'm all for monoliths and hosted solutions, but let's not pretend that saving $1k / month is going to make or break most businesses. What OP appears to have done is take on risk to save costs. Another thing is, even when the cloud goes down, the story is "Global outages caused by Azure/AWS/GCloud/etc going down", and people are generally understanding. If you have an outage of your machine, the story is "<Your Company> services down".
- darkstar_16 2y ago
  He's an indie developer from the looks of it. $1k is a decent sum of money and maybe the effort is worth it.
- jillesvangurp 2y ago
  Exactly. If you work for 100$ an hour, which would be on the cheap side for skilled devops people and you put a 100 hours in to move a lot of servers offline; that's going to cost 10K$. That would be a small project. A bit over two weeks for a single person. Then add support, regular maintenance, etc. And it starts adding up more cost. And to get to 24x7 uptime, you need skilled people on stand by all the time. All that at 100$/hour/person. That's a lot of cost that you need to factor into your calculations. Mostly it doesn't make sense for small companies to be doing this. With many companies, the realistic cost of moving off cloud in labor would be higher than years of cumulative bills for cloud hosting. Even if you don't value your own time, you might want to consider doing something more valuable with it than devops.
- sph 2y ago
  > If you have an outage of your machine, the story is "<Your Company> services down". That is silly for two reasons: 1. Cloud doesn't save you from outages 2. Outages happen, and are usually very rare, whatever your host That said, I have fewer outages on my machines than AWS has on theirs. I run a service for a client, on one server, that has had 100% uptime during workdays for 7 years.
  - 2y ago
deafpolygon 2y ago
10x less money sounds impressive, but the actual savings is 15k a year - less than half what it would cost to hire a full-time sysadmin to keep things updated, running smoothly, backed up. And if you never hire a sysadmin? That’s ok, you’re spending the time to maintain it. 10h a week to keep things running smoothly means ~25 dollars per hour over the year. Do you earn more than that or is your time worth 25 an hour?
- justinclift 2y ago
  Sounds like there's no DevOps/SysAdmin staff needed when using the cloud? ;)
  - deafpolygon 2y ago
    Never implied that. But it's much easier for an IT "department" of 1 to maintain a fleet of cloud services than a bunch of machines in a closet. When dealing with numbers like 15k/year... it's implied that we're not dealing with a full staff.
    - llm_trw 2y ago
      So you hire someone who enjoys building computers in their free time instead of someone who is an AWS expert where both have a 0.2 loading on infra.
    - justinclift 2y ago
      > ... a fleet of cloud services than a bunch of machines in a closet. Maybe for a bunch of machines in a closet. But modern dedicated servers and similar are pretty easy to maintain. ;)
- nirvdrum 2y ago
  That savings is significant when bootstrapping. And the cloud costs often increase in short order. With a colo server you’re not having to worry about a runaway process or config issue skyrocketing costs. That $120 is fixed and there’s probably a ton of headroom in there for growth. It’s been several years since I’ve run a business, but I had moved from AWS to a colo ESXi setup. I saved a bunch of money and got a better product. My costs were fixed, the hardware was better, the VM sizes more configurable, and I had high availability. I wasn’t spending anywhere near 10h / week to keep it running. Linux and most daemons are pretty robust. I’d gladly acquire and exercise general sysadmin knowledge over some vendor-specific thing. AWS may run fine if you have a light load, but their API docs can lie, they have hidden constraints, and many apps end up using the wrong service or architecture and need to go through costly migrations. It’s hardly set it and forget it. There’s a ton of services and constraints to learn. There’s time involved in learning the tooling, the API, and the invariable bugs integrating with the devops tool of the day. Then you need to factor in the time spent trying to speed up your app to compensate for the slow cloud machine you’re running on. You can choose beefier machine types, but you’ll pay through the nose. Performance can be wildly inconsistent if you’re on an oversubscribed host. So, you can get a cloud bare metal machine, but that’s even more money and good luck getting the spend approved. To get out of that hole teams will often layer in brittle caching that would be otherwise unnecessary. These costs rarely get mentioned when we talk about cloud vs bare metal. That was a substantial time sink for the startups I was at. Large companies have whole teams dedicated to devops, which isn’t far off from having a traditional ops team.
geff82 2y ago
On a related note - what is 10x less? Usually people mean 90% off. Wouldn't 10x less be the following: list price is 1000$. You get a rebate of 1$ and then pay 999$. Then you get a really good discount, 10x of that and then you pay "10x less" while still pay 989$?
- elcomet 2y ago
  It just means x/10
  - fellerts 2y ago
    That's a tenth. I agree with GP, "ten times less" is ambiguous.
    - hawski 2y ago
      If "ten times more" is "x * 10", then "ten times less" is "x / 10".
- Luc 2y ago
  You understand '10 times more', right? Well, '10 times less' is the inverse of that.

62 points by baxtr 2y ago

sph 2y ago

I wonder if there is some major propaganda push on HN to discourage actual software engineers from ever running their servers. Judging from the comments in this and similar posts, sounds like it is common belief that it's super expensive and a full time job to run bare metal services. AWS and GCP free credits have created a generation of developers that think running a webserver, a webapp and a database is rocket science, and when stuff breaks the whole company might go bankrupt because no one could ever save a corrupted database. Now a company with thousands of server should probably leverage big cloud offerings, but when we see a post that someone is able to save 10x by going bare metal, and they don't seem to be running a large operation, we should celebrate that, rather than parrot that it is a bad idea, oh god what have you done, no one will ever be able to run servers on their own, it's not worth it. For comparison, I manage half a dozen servers for clients and I literally do 1 hour of maintenance a year.

llm_trw 2y ago
I have a 10kW 4090 training cluster in my garage with water cooling. It paid itself back in 3 months if I'd used AWS services.
- alanfranz 2y ago
  Not something that requires HA, backups, scaling, auditing, logs, security, and such, though. Would you run your prod inference cluster the same way?
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    It's little brother is the prod inference cluster. It's had an uptime of 100% over the last two years. People seriously don't realize just how _big_ computers have gotten. The AWS mentality is still stuck in 2005 when a t2.micro was a decent computer.
    - Dunedan 2y ago
      > The AWS mentality is still stuck in 2005 when a t2.micro was a decent computer. The T2 EC2 instance family got announced in 2014: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/startups/announcing-amazon-ec2-t2/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/startups/announcing-amazon-ec2-...
      - llm_trw 2y ago
        The first instance was the m1.small it's specs are marginally better than those of t2.micro, it's not been generally available since 2022 if memory serves. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-instance-history/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-instance-history/ https://instances.vantage.sh/aws/ec2/t2.micro https://instances.vantage.sh/aws/ec2/t2.micro https://instances.vantage.sh/aws/ec2/m1.small https://instances.vantage.sh/aws/ec2/m1.small Please nitpick better. Nothing is more embarrassing then being pedantic and wrong.
      - rcxdude 2y ago
        And t2.micro was not a decent computer at that time.
  - apitman 2y ago
    You don't need most of that until you're making enough money to hire someone to worry about it.
- sulandor 2y ago
  is that enough to heat your house in the winter?
apitman 2y ago
It's weird how certain everyone is that it would take a ton of time to maintain. I mean, maybe. Depends on what you're running.
- ghomem 2y ago
  People want simple answers. "It depends" annoys everyone :-\
bryanrasmussen 2y ago
In my experience running AWS etc. is something that takes at least one dev who is a subject matter expert, so it doesn't seem like it would be at all problematic to have the same thing for bare metal - a dev who is the SME on the bare metal. Also if you have everything ready to push to a cloud provider in the case of the server going down, someone like Vercel or Netlify (easier to maintain than AWS in my experience) then I guess you are pretty setup.
Cpoll 2y ago
Disagreeing with your thesis isn't propaganda. If anything, you could argue the tweet is propaganda, because the labels for the AWS bar chart is missing. (Not that I think that's what's happening). Hetzner nodes aren't actually 10x cheaper than AWS instances, so there's stuff like bandwidth usage going on. My point being there's no silver bullet, sometimes cloud makes sense and sometimes it doesn't.
- earnesti 2y ago
  Yeah, hetzner nodes aren't 10x cheaper, because the products are not comparable. AWS/cloud services innovation is that their offering is incomparable and setup in a way which makes comparison very difficult. It is not only the hardware cost that saves you money, but also the fact that if you rent dedicated servers you tend to develop your infra in a different way which is ultimately way more cost effective. Dedicated servers definitely aren't a silver bullet, nobody is saying that. Managing your own servers requires work - how much, that is arguable and depends on many factors. To me the problem is more that AWS and cloud companies are selling a very expensive silver bullet, which really isn't even a silver bullet. In my experience most of the time it doesn't make sense to buy that.
  - Cpoll 2y ago
    I often find myself in a mid-size situation that's awkward. Hetzner doesn't provide SLAs, so if I have to then I need to run my clusters across multiple providers. If I need to support full DR in 8hrs I need to have something on another data center, I can't just run my AWS terraform in a different region. If my infra were 10x larger I'd go dedicated, but right now I'm happy enough to eat the AWS premium. > develop your infra in a different way Totally agree, but for many people that ship has sailed.
    - dijit 2y ago
      > Hetzner doesn't provide SLAs They do if you enter an agreement with them for professional services; I'm not certain but I think there's an SLA also on their "managed" servers: https://www.hetzner.com/managed-server/ https://www.hetzner.com/managed-server/ However, if you want a "no-human" SLA with bare-metal rented servers, I could recommend Gcore: https://gcore.com/hosting/dedicated https://gcore.com/hosting/dedicated Their managed kubernetes even supports bare-metal nodes, which is actually something I'm using.
cjfd 2y ago
I think so. People create and/or sell new technologies. Then they try to market them. For instance, by writing articles exaggerating the advantages and/or downplaying the disadvantages. Then this get picked up by other folks who want something new and interesting to write about. And suddenly there is a new and hot thing even if there are lots of cases where it does not help.
Dalewyn 2y ago
>sounds like it is common belief that it's super expensive and a full time job to run bare metal services. Remember the age old saying: Time is money. If you run your own servers, you are spending your own time and thus money to manage them. If you buy services from hosting ("cloud") providers, you spend money to have someone else manage them. The question then becomes: Do you value your time or your money more? And then you pick the one that spends the one you value less. Some people value their time, some people value their money. YMMV.
- sph 2y ago
  Your comment doesn't take into account that some things cost more than others, and might be not worth it their price. Running a server by yourself isn't more time consuming than having AWS do it for you. The issues that cause very long downtimes are flooding of the server room, subpar connectivity, low quality hardware, CPU is on fire. Just do not host your production services in your basement. Any VPS saves you from these, at 1/10th the AWS cost. This is obvious to anyone that has the basic skills to run a Linux host. The fact that it needs to be spelled out means that these days few have the skills and/or the others have been convinced that it is "a waste of time" and "makes only sense if your time is worthless" which is total FUD.
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    I've realized that my time only becomes more valuable as I get older, to the point that if a problem can be solved by just throwing more money at it then that is a very compelling solution. Sure, buying a VPS or whatever from a hosting provider might be cheaper than buying a full blown cloud solution, but at what personal time cost? Time is a finite resource, much more than most of us ever realize. Worse, time is a resource that cannot be replenished. Money, on the other hand, is a replenishable and theoretically infinite resource. Sometimes, paying big bucks for premium services is the cheaper solution to moving on in life.
    - jgb1984 2y ago
      It takes me more time to find what I need in the infernal hell hole of an AWS web interface, try to understand their hopelessly complex jungle of lingo and abstraction layers. Hell, I'll deploy a fresh Hetzner bare metal server with Debian in a matter of 3-4 minutes and roll with it. 10 times more bang for your buck, no vendor lock in, and guess what: I am in control. I know what runs on my server. I understand the platform inside out. I don't trust developers who are afraid of setting up their own Linux server.
fileeditview 2y ago
> I wonder if there is some major propaganda push on HN to discourage actual software engineers from ever running their servers. Judging from the comments in this and similar posts, sounds like it is common belief that it's super expensive and a full time job to run bare metal services. AWS and GCP free credits have created a generation of developers that think running a webserver, a webapp and a database is rocket science, and when stuff breaks the whole company might go bankrupt because no one could ever save a corrupted database. Related to this observation you really should watch DHHs keynote talk at Rails World 2024 from about minute 20 to 30: https://youtu.be/-cEn_83zRFw?t=1296 https://youtu.be/-cEn_83zRFw?t=1296 He addresses exactly this phenomenon. EDIT: changed URL to include timestamp to the start of the relevant content.
ghomem 2y ago
>I wonder if there is some major propaganda push on HN to discourage actual >software engineers from ever running their servers How to scare a computer engineer in 2024? Invite him to configure a server.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
hagbard_c 2y ago
I thing this is partly the result of people simply parroting shallow statements concerning 'backup, availability, disaster recovery,...' they've read or heard elsewhere, partly the result of a general push towards a service economy where it is considered smart to outsource to 'the experts'. While this may make sense in some cases - e.g. those where the task at hand is not recurring and requires knowledge or equipment which is not at hand and hard/expensive to come by - it is often more expensive and less flexible than just doing the thing yourself. Of course HN is a site frequented by people who are wont to start those same service companies so it is not surprising for there to be a tendency to play up the 'risks' of doing things yourself instead of 'leaving it to the experts'.

alanfranz 2y ago

The cloud is so incredibly good. But it’s expensive. This setup seems quite a maintenance hell. Let’s see what happens to his SLAs.

sshine 2y ago
His SLAs are probably fine. The hidden cost is the time he spends. However, if running computers are your business, spending time on getting money is called having a job.
- lamontcg 2y ago
  > The hidden cost is the time he spends. Everyone seems to think that managing AWS is free.

xela79 2y ago

it really depends on the scope of what you run in the cloud and what kind of support/uptime you expect/require. if you're going to run your own servers with same level of support it will definitely be much higher than $120/month but this is, alas, not the tech issue, but a more low level understanding the reasoning of why cloud is more interesting for certain use cases, and on prem better for other. it is definitely not a one solution fits all edit: https://rameerez.com/how-i-exited-the-cloud/ https://rameerez.com/how-i-exited-the-cloud/ oh wait, he did not get anything "off the cloud" he is still running on a "cloud" based solution, just a different company. LOL

klipklop 2y ago

This is a hilariously small deployment. Anybody that assumes bare metal is easy at scale has not had to build out and cool data centers. Heck even designing and keeping the hvac running properly requires expertise. Same with powering all this stuff. One electrical fried rat in the right place can really ruin your weekend. I still believe running your own servers is cheaper but there is a tun of logistics you don’t want to really deal with.

hanikesn 2y ago
Did you ever hear of colocation, root servers and VPSs?
jgb1984 2y ago
It's weird how the same straw man argument comes back when this topic is discussed. As if the only two options in the world are cloud and on-premises bare metal. While the best solution is often to simply rent a bare metal server from any of the big hosting providers like Hetzner. They take care of cooling, physical security, hardware failures, network infrastructure etc. All you have to do is manage the server. Which isn't more or less work than managing the horror that is AWS (just 1000x more enjoyable in my opinion) while getting 10 times more bang for your buck.
dijit 2y ago
I ran 1% of Web Traffic in 2011 without running my own datacenter. Our "platform" team was 6 people, two network engineers and four "devops" (Sysadmins that could write code, but were still called SysAdmins then). We had two datacenters, one was SAVVIS in Winnersh Triangle, the other was in Santa-Clara USA. We used remote hands- rarely- in the event that a cable died or a harddisk needed to be replaced, though such events are exceptionally rare even at the scale we had. Mostly we would collect up failures and visit one day every 3 months.
orev 2y ago
The vast majority of applications are “hilariously small deployments” and only use the cloud or k8s because the engineer wants that on their resume. And there’s a huge range of sizes between “hilariously small” and “needs a whole data center”. This conversation always seems to assume everything is and needs to be Google-scale.

DoingIsLearning 2y ago

Aside from the 'it's a cargo cult' discussion, when we start dissecting these technical merits we often miss the business angle of __Accountability__. This is exactly the reason why you see Fortune 500 companies paying millions to external consultants for what seem to be fairly trivial advisory/decision making tasks. If you are running something big enough and business critical enough and you roll your own custom _anything_, even if you save a gazillion, you are a hero for the next quarter. But if your custom solution goes fubar you are packing your boxes. The effort/time/cost of managing/configuring cloud anything is negligible if it allows people in companies where Software is a cost centre to deflect liability if something goes fubar. It's pretty much the revamped 21st century version of the 80's meme "nobody got fired for buying IBM". Nobody will get fired at big corp for going all in on Azure or AWS. Look at CrowdStrike's cluster fuck, there were zero heads rolled for using the cloud services impacted by it. The very opposite would be true if it happened on bare metal servers. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, carry a 'too big to go wrong' halo with them (at least in public discourse) and that just sells.

growse 2y ago
The flip side of this is control. If s3 goes down, and therefore your service is down, there's little you can do about it whilst your customers are screaming at you.
- api 2y ago
  Yes but you can blame S3. I think the OP had a major point. In large organizations the incentive is to have someone to blame that is not you.
  - growse 2y ago
    If I was paying a large amount of money for a service that was then down, and then the vendor just shrugged with "s3 is down, nothing I can do", I'd be re-tendering that very day.
    - api 2y ago

huksley 2y ago

His setup is pretty uncomplicated: - database (postgres) - redis cache - webserver How to exit the cloud (aka run everything in VPS) if you also need this? - reliable and scalable block storage - queue / task management - trusted email-sending provider Not questioning the trend, just seriously interested in finding solutions to this.

betaby 2y ago
> His setup is pretty uncomplicated Like the of the AWS deployed sites.

y0ned4 2y ago

Using the cloud = losing your know-how + gaining vendor lock-in

betaby 2y ago
Some people even say 'cloud == deskilling'.

chadcmulligan 2y ago

Its probably the beginning of the next phase in the we should centralise everything/no thats bad - lets decentralise everything cycle. The 'one stop shop' idea describes it pretty well https://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/onestopshop.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/onestopshop.asp

Heloseaa 2y ago

Too scared to ask, but isn't it still the cloud ? The OP is just not using managed services anymore, which is obviously less expensive. I always thought that all kind of servers in datacenters could be defined as cloud server.

dijit 2y ago
"Cloud" is hyperscalers and managed services. The idea was, I think, related to network diagrams that showed everything outside of your own border as a cloud icon. (IE; very foggy and unknown). It never really made much sense, but normally what seems to separate a MSP/service or colocation is the availability of managed object storage and an abstraction on the network. However, now it seems to have been coopted and now means basically anything that isn't in your closet. However we ran many physical machines we paid for in colocation facilities, and when AWS was coming up there was an understanding that "that's not what the cloud is" among the masses. Despite managing them over the internet. So, a fuzzy term has become more fuzzy. So much for us being "engineers".

ghomem 2y ago

Yeah, the Emperor's New Clouds. Sometime ago I thought I was crazy and everybody else was right :-) but now we are seeing more and more people doing the numbers. https://logical.li/blog/emperors-new-clouds/ https://logical.li/blog/emperors-new-clouds/ I wonder, though, why the topic is so contentious. This is supposed to be an engineering discipline, not a fight between religions.

xenospn 2y ago
First time on HN?
lamontcg 2y ago
You could do configuration management in the 90s with rdist well enough on 100 servers. The problem with IT in the early 2000s was that IT departments were shoveling money to companies like VMWare and EMC and overbuilding all their hardware. Amazon built everything on commodity hardware and open source and didn't have vendors acting like financial boat anchors on their scalability. IT departments also usually had massive amounts of friction and gatekeeping to getting anything done, and you needed a design review meeting to spin up a single server for someone. And really I think it was elimination of that centralized control and bureaucracy that made cloud computing so popular.

vandyswa 2y ago

This discussion is interesting, but I'm always cautious viewing discussion when an argument contrary to the interests of a very, very, very large industry are in play.

erik_seaberg 2y ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41723600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41723600

jmstfv 2y ago

if you're running a small operation, as I do, there aren't many reasons to use Big Cloud. i've been running my tiny business on the same provider as op for more than a year, and i've done very little maintenance to keep things up and running. granted, you need to set things up the first time, but after that, it just keeps chugging along.

throwaway2016a 2y ago

Reading through these comments I'm not sure everyone is on the same page as to what "Cloud" actually is. In both the Twitter thread and the HN comments people seem to think VPS in no longer "cloud". IMO you are not "off the cloud" unless you own the hardware. A VPS is not that much different than an EC2 instance. So in reality you just converted from cattle to pets[1] while just being on a different type of cloud. And once you get into actual colocation you have to buy the hardware, have redundancy, and the colocation facility is probably charging you quite a bit (and perhaps even extra for bandwidth and power consumption). [1] "cattle" refers to a disposable and easily replaceable resource, like virtual machines or containers, while "pets" are unique, carefully tended servers that are individually managed and not easily replaceable.

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

Paying less is only one potential benefit. Another, arguably more important, guaranteed benefit is control. For me control is the number one issue with computers today. Not cost, not features, not convenience or anything else. "Cloud" computing has been defined as "someone else's computer". Bloggers and other pundits have also cited a "war on general purpose computing". These complaints, and others, to me, are summarised by the issue of control.

Davereye99 2y ago

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stellaglenn77 2y ago

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henrynoah2025 2y ago

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DeathArrow 2y ago

Story is here: https://rameerez.com/how-i-exited-the-cloud/ https://rameerez.com/how-i-exited-the-cloud/

asterios33 2y ago
The fact that this guy is using GP2 EBS volumes right off the bat makes me question his AWS savvy. If he’d optimized from the start in the cloud, the story could have been about ‘How I Saved 2x on Monthly Infrastructure Costs,’ with a meaningful discussion around trade-offs and architecture choices. Instead, he’s running an idle server, consuming 400W like it’s still 2007
- apitman 2y ago
  You say that as if AWS pricing isn't designed to be confusing in order to get people to spend more money. There are people who do nothing but consult on AWS because it's so complicated. I don't want to learn AWS, I want to build things.
- skrebbel 2y ago
  > his AWS savvy It seems to me that at this point, being an AWS customer is about as difficult as running a server manually. It's just different skills. The risk of running your own servers is certain kinds of downtime may be harder to fix (though if you have some "sysadmin savvy", ie, backups, it shouldn't be much), and the risk of being an AWS customer is accidentally paying 10x what you should.
- cjs_ac 2y ago
  Until recently, the AWS pricing page had no prices on it. (Or, if it did have prices, I couldn't find them.)

xnorswap 2y ago

Where "10x less money" is still less than the cost of a single developer. If this needs any extra work then it's just been busy work and change for the sake of it. I'm all for monoliths and hosted solutions, but let's not pretend that saving $1k / month is going to make or break most businesses. What OP appears to have done is take on risk to save costs. Another thing is, even when the cloud goes down, the story is "Global outages caused by Azure/AWS/GCloud/etc going down", and people are generally understanding. If you have an outage of your machine, the story is "<Your Company> services down".

darkstar_16 2y ago
He's an indie developer from the looks of it. $1k is a decent sum of money and maybe the effort is worth it.
jillesvangurp 2y ago
Exactly. If you work for 100$ an hour, which would be on the cheap side for skilled devops people and you put a 100 hours in to move a lot of servers offline; that's going to cost 10K$. That would be a small project. A bit over two weeks for a single person. Then add support, regular maintenance, etc. And it starts adding up more cost. And to get to 24x7 uptime, you need skilled people on stand by all the time. All that at 100$/hour/person. That's a lot of cost that you need to factor into your calculations. Mostly it doesn't make sense for small companies to be doing this. With many companies, the realistic cost of moving off cloud in labor would be higher than years of cumulative bills for cloud hosting. Even if you don't value your own time, you might want to consider doing something more valuable with it than devops.
sph 2y ago
> If you have an outage of your machine, the story is "<Your Company> services down". That is silly for two reasons: 1. Cloud doesn't save you from outages 2. Outages happen, and are usually very rare, whatever your host That said, I have fewer outages on my machines than AWS has on theirs. I run a service for a client, on one server, that has had 100% uptime during workdays for 7 years.
- 2y ago

deafpolygon 2y ago

10x less money sounds impressive, but the actual savings is 15k a year - less than half what it would cost to hire a full-time sysadmin to keep things updated, running smoothly, backed up. And if you never hire a sysadmin? That’s ok, you’re spending the time to maintain it. 10h a week to keep things running smoothly means ~25 dollars per hour over the year. Do you earn more than that or is your time worth 25 an hour?

justinclift 2y ago
Sounds like there's no DevOps/SysAdmin staff needed when using the cloud? ;)
- deafpolygon 2y ago
  Never implied that. But it's much easier for an IT "department" of 1 to maintain a fleet of cloud services than a bunch of machines in a closet. When dealing with numbers like 15k/year... it's implied that we're not dealing with a full staff.
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    So you hire someone who enjoys building computers in their free time instead of someone who is an AWS expert where both have a 0.2 loading on infra.
  - justinclift 2y ago
    > ... a fleet of cloud services than a bunch of machines in a closet. Maybe for a bunch of machines in a closet. But modern dedicated servers and similar are pretty easy to maintain. ;)
nirvdrum 2y ago
That savings is significant when bootstrapping. And the cloud costs often increase in short order. With a colo server you’re not having to worry about a runaway process or config issue skyrocketing costs. That $120 is fixed and there’s probably a ton of headroom in there for growth. It’s been several years since I’ve run a business, but I had moved from AWS to a colo ESXi setup. I saved a bunch of money and got a better product. My costs were fixed, the hardware was better, the VM sizes more configurable, and I had high availability. I wasn’t spending anywhere near 10h / week to keep it running. Linux and most daemons are pretty robust. I’d gladly acquire and exercise general sysadmin knowledge over some vendor-specific thing. AWS may run fine if you have a light load, but their API docs can lie, they have hidden constraints, and many apps end up using the wrong service or architecture and need to go through costly migrations. It’s hardly set it and forget it. There’s a ton of services and constraints to learn. There’s time involved in learning the tooling, the API, and the invariable bugs integrating with the devops tool of the day. Then you need to factor in the time spent trying to speed up your app to compensate for the slow cloud machine you’re running on. You can choose beefier machine types, but you’ll pay through the nose. Performance can be wildly inconsistent if you’re on an oversubscribed host. So, you can get a cloud bare metal machine, but that’s even more money and good luck getting the spend approved. To get out of that hole teams will often layer in brittle caching that would be otherwise unnecessary. These costs rarely get mentioned when we talk about cloud vs bare metal. That was a substantial time sink for the startups I was at. Large companies have whole teams dedicated to devops, which isn’t far off from having a traditional ops team.

geff82 2y ago

On a related note - what is 10x less? Usually people mean 90% off. Wouldn't 10x less be the following: list price is 1000$. You get a rebate of 1$ and then pay 999$. Then you get a really good discount, 10x of that and then you pay "10x less" while still pay 989$?

elcomet 2y ago
It just means x/10
- fellerts 2y ago
  That's a tenth. I agree with GP, "ten times less" is ambiguous.
  - hawski 2y ago
    If "ten times more" is "x * 10", then "ten times less" is "x / 10".
Luc 2y ago
You understand '10 times more', right? Well, '10 times less' is the inverse of that.