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Comment by dokalanyi | Hacker News Reader

What alternatives to AWS could save a non trivial amount of money? Especially for RDS? I think we're getting to the point where servers cost quite a bit

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https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/px61-nvme

Substract VAT from the price, add HDD for WAL, and setup PostgreSQL on a couple of them.

Don't understand why you're being downvoted. Install Kubernetes and make your own cloud. It really depends on your workload whether that's better than managed cloud services with elastic scaling:

* your software has a startup time that takes too long - cannot scale down easily

* you have a constant base load with only moderate peaks

* you'd rather run other background tasks at times with low load than scaling down - this way you get a bunch of "free" compute power you can use for other things

Installing kunernetes is something you can only suggest if you haven't done yourself. Getting it right is extremely non trivial

Having set up couple of clusters myself, professionally, I can say setup is extremely easy relative to the functionality you are getting if you wanted to get it by traditional means (traditional = pre-cloud tech).

What is complicated is that this absolutely does not absolve you from having to understand everything that is happening under the hood. If you feel Kubernetes replaces that requirement you are doomed first time a non-trivial issue happens.

Could you share some insights on what you think is "extremely non trivial"? In what way is Kubernetes harder than what's to be expected of a technology that orchestrates serverside software? Doesn't this rather depend on the actual services you want to run rather than Kubernetes itself? Obviously it won't reduce complexity of what you want to run, but it makes deployments of it pretty straight forward as far as I can tell.

I have so far found Hetzner Dedicated servers to resist most forms of "infrastructure as code".

I can't seem to even be able to restore one from an image...

This applies only to dedicated ... but to me that's the interesting part of Hetzner.

I might just use Ansible to provision Hetzner servers that I set up manually initially. The cost savings are there to make it worth the hassle.

Wish there was a cleaner approach.

I wouldn't suggest to use that for the main DB, but for almost everything else docker works perfectly fine on Hetzner.

Right, but I'm concerned with the initial provisioning of the OS on which docker runs. It's not nothing even if the apps run in docker.

In most cases, you can just provision the OS from a web interface. If you get a bigger machine where you need to configure the disks yourself, there is a pretty easy to use command line tool they built which does most of the work.

The only part which I had to learn the hard way is configuring iptables to secure my servers against external attacks. Luckily, recent versions of docker make it easy to keep iptables configured - at the beginning, that was almost a nightmare...

Is there a command line tool to automate installing the OS?

Well what I would really like is to be able to deploy something like an "AMI" on these dedicated servers. Any ideas for how to get something close?

Yes, there is one: https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Installimage/en

I am hoping DO will up the game in that. [1] I am not sure how big the market is for a only VM + DBaaS, because from my limited scope that is like 90% of what I need. The other 10% I am happy to have DNS, Transitional Emails, Register, CDN all under different companies to avoid putting all eggs in one basket. I do wish there is an UI to integrate all of it though. ( Yes I know that is exactly like Heroku, but I am cheap, Heroku is already much more expensive than AWS, I often wonder what if Heroku runs on top of DO )

[1] https://try.digitalocean.com/dbaas-beta/

> Especially for RDS?

Run your own servers, instead of paying Amazon to do your system administration. At small sizes, Amazon is a cheap sysadmin. At scale, paying them as sysadmins is expensive.

Even at quite large sizes, RDS is a fantastic product. I think I'd opt to use it even with full time Database Administrators on staff.

I just moved one of the largest (5+PB) data warehouses of Europe to AWS and we saved 35% of a huge (1M+ / year) budget while increased reliability, availability and security. I am not sure why people think that AWS is expensive. Running on a traditional hosting was a nightmare with constant downtimes because of issues outside of our control. Cooling, networking, security you name it. AWS makes these non-existent or very easy to tackle. For example of networking, there are several teams of network engineers oncall for AWS the handle routing issues etc. and you just get an email about it. With the previous vendor we found about the issue, tried to reach the vendor and we had to convince them that there is an issue and it took them 2 days to recover.

I am planning to move to AWS more entreprise clients for saving significant money on IT. AWS is most definitely a competitive option for this.

You seem to be talking about EC2, or at least services available with EC2. You parent was talking about RDS and sysadmins who manage Postgres on RDS.

Azure is both comparable to and cheaper than (and subjectively better) AWS.

But that's trading lock-in to AWS for lock-in to Microsoft.

Still kind of diversifying

I've literally never heard this from anyone who's used both at an enterprise level. Personally I recommended azure a few years ago rather than aws for a docker based microservice app but the biggest drawback was the cost. What exactly are you running that's cheaper?

The Google cloud solutions are very competitive in price with the AWS ones.

The lock in is the same though.

We are having A LOT of troubles due to lock in with Google Cloud (particularly GAE and Datastore, but also Pub/Sub) and it is really not fun at all...

You can always design around that. I know I'm mostly locked in when I deploy a classic GAE application or when I use the datastore (there is AppScale, if you need).

If what you are running is a virtualized version of your physical DC infrastructure, you can probably deploy it anywhere with very little trouble.

Google doesn't seem to be serious with their managed DBMS solutions. The PostgreSQL version is still 9.6 even though 11 has been released, whereas AWS already has pg 11 available.

Consider if most data in RDS should be in a data warehouse instead.

Google’s BigQuery can help offset costs. Not to mention GCP is now a strong contender to AWS’s offerings.

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