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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

by 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.
    - Cpoll 2y ago
      But the managed servers look comparable in price to AWS instances at the same specs? (I'm eyeballing, I don't want to pull numbers on my phone). I don't want bare metal nodes, they put a high lower bound on the cost of a distributed cluster. I want a "herd" distributed across data centers, and a system that spins up new ones if the old ones die. I don't care if AWS shuts down an ec2 instance without warning, because a new one will automatically replace it.
dijit 2y ago
> Disagreeing with your thesis isn't propaganda. The issue is not that people disagree, it's that: 1) People use surface level arguments that have been debunked a few times (SLA, backups, reduction in headcount) 2) There is an aggressively high frequency of these arguments. If you couple that with the marketing spend of major cloud providers; it's easy to paint a picture of at least a small contingent of people who's livelihoods depend on keeping cloud growing; combined with a contingent of people who have skilled into a cloud (sunk-cost fallacy) and don't want to reskill and you have a decent self-reinforcing propaganda machine. It likely helps things that there's nobody except a tiny plurality of nerds who really care to refute the marketing claims. There's not many colocation or hosting companies with even 1% of the marketing spend of even the third largest hyperscaler (google). I wrote about the three major reasons you'd want to use a cloud provider here: https://blog.dijit.sh/gcp-the-only-good-cloud/ https://blog.dijit.sh/gcp-the-only-good-cloud/
fabian2k 2y ago
It is not comparing the same thing, but if you look strictly at the specs of the hardware you get then AWS can be easily 5-10 times as expensive as Hetzner. If you include bandwith the difference can be far more ridiculous if you get anywhere close to using the amount of traffic that is included in the price with Hetzner. If I take the Hetzner AX102 (16 cores, 128GB ECC RAM, 2x1.92 TB NVMe SSD) that costs about $0.2 per hour. An EC2 instance (on demand) with 32 vCPUs starts at around $1.2 per hour, so 6 times as expensive. And this doesn't include storage which would be something like an additional $0.3 per hour for AWS. Of course this isn't a fair comparison. Using on demand instances is somewhat unfair to AWS, but reserved instances also wouldn't be entirely fair as you're only locked in for a month with Hetzner (with a setup fee for most server) and not 1-3 years. I'm guessing with the CPUs here and assume that 2 vCPUs are roughly one real core. And the storage is not comparable at all. You do get a lot of other things with AWS, but you usually also pay for those. Which can certainly be worth it. But I am slightly tired of people arguing that you save money with the cloud because you can scale down automatically. And this argument doesn't really work in many cases if you get that much more hardware for your money.

by Cpoll 2y ago

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.
  - Cpoll 2y ago
    But the managed servers look comparable in price to AWS instances at the same specs? (I'm eyeballing, I don't want to pull numbers on my phone). I don't want bare metal nodes, they put a high lower bound on the cost of a distributed cluster. I want a "herd" distributed across data centers, and a system that spins up new ones if the old ones die. I don't care if AWS shuts down an ec2 instance without warning, because a new one will automatically replace it.

dijit 2y ago

> Disagreeing with your thesis isn't propaganda. The issue is not that people disagree, it's that: 1) People use surface level arguments that have been debunked a few times (SLA, backups, reduction in headcount) 2) There is an aggressively high frequency of these arguments. If you couple that with the marketing spend of major cloud providers; it's easy to paint a picture of at least a small contingent of people who's livelihoods depend on keeping cloud growing; combined with a contingent of people who have skilled into a cloud (sunk-cost fallacy) and don't want to reskill and you have a decent self-reinforcing propaganda machine. It likely helps things that there's nobody except a tiny plurality of nerds who really care to refute the marketing claims. There's not many colocation or hosting companies with even 1% of the marketing spend of even the third largest hyperscaler (google). I wrote about the three major reasons you'd want to use a cloud provider here: https://blog.dijit.sh/gcp-the-only-good-cloud/ https://blog.dijit.sh/gcp-the-only-good-cloud/

fabian2k 2y ago

It is not comparing the same thing, but if you look strictly at the specs of the hardware you get then AWS can be easily 5-10 times as expensive as Hetzner. If you include bandwith the difference can be far more ridiculous if you get anywhere close to using the amount of traffic that is included in the price with Hetzner. If I take the Hetzner AX102 (16 cores, 128GB ECC RAM, 2x1.92 TB NVMe SSD) that costs about $0.2 per hour. An EC2 instance (on demand) with 32 vCPUs starts at around $1.2 per hour, so 6 times as expensive. And this doesn't include storage which would be something like an additional $0.3 per hour for AWS. Of course this isn't a fair comparison. Using on demand instances is somewhat unfair to AWS, but reserved instances also wouldn't be entirely fair as you're only locked in for a month with Hetzner (with a setup fee for most server) and not 1-3 years. I'm guessing with the CPUs here and assume that 2 vCPUs are roughly one real core. And the storage is not comparable at all. You do get a lot of other things with AWS, but you usually also pay for those. Which can certainly be worth it. But I am slightly tired of people arguing that you save money with the cloud because you can scale down automatically. And this argument doesn't really work in many cases if you get that much more hardware for your money.