Ask HN: Cloud providers are losing in favor of bare-metal?

Given that AWS, Azure and GCP are all recording 20-40% YoY growth, no, I don’t think they’re losing ground.

As for startup credits, they’re still handing out $100-200k like candy if they deem you a serious startup. There was a lot of abuse in the past so they started putting up filters.

I don’t think so. Hetzner sees some growth but they are still very small.

DB can have replicas and upload dumps to some S3 compatible object stores. Like in the cloud. CI/CD with stuff like gitlab and Argo CD is mostly the same. You can install some log monitoring stuff like the classic Elk stack. Or be old fashioned and use ssh and journalctl.

I wouldn’t attempt to automatically scale to the moon on bare metal, that won’t happen. But a few beefy servers running k3s or similar can get you pretty far.

It's just the meme of the year. There's nothing that changed really for quite a long time. Some cloud services provide things on a simplistic and easy way, some in complex and complete ecosystem. The same choice and the tradeoffs have always been there.

The only change is that it's popular to write a "how we saved $$$" blog posts. Which actually could be read as "how we failed to do proper analysis and kept losing $$$ for years".

Not necessarily "failure": for a startup, it makes sense to prioritize speed of development over cost optimization. Since you don't know just how fast your MVP will grow, remaining elastic early on is a plus, and sticking with hyperscalers gives you that (you never know, you may land on the front page of Slashdow and HN at the same time..).

For solo indie developers, in contrast, it makes more sense to seek out the cost optimal setup straight away.

I totally get the tradeoffs, but that's not what I'm talking about. For example the popular Hey article was 10 years into their operations and they were spending multiple millions with AWS. That's not a startup anymore, and they don't need to optimise for unexpected 10x growth. At some point for new companies it transforms from "good decision" to "total cost is comparable" to "we should notice cloud doesn't make sense now" to "we're years late and failed at planning".

99% of all “startups” will never grow past the need of one VM and one database - that includes all of the dumb “AI startups” that YC is funding.

Interesting that you call hetzner “bare metal”. Most of their product offerings are cloud based VMs (and certainly for $20 a month you are getting shared hardware VMs). Do you think more devs are are actually buying hardware/servers or do you just mean devs are using VMs provided by smaller companies instead of the hyper scalers, when you say “bare metal”.

True, more than bare-metal I meant dedicated servers on-premise

Again that’s a confusing line. Hetzner does not provide (as its main business) “on premise” options as id use that term.

When you get dedicated servers from them, typically it’s VMs on their machines, in their data centers and the hyper scalers have options just like that.

Er, sorry to interject... incorrect: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/

Not interested in arguing a pointless distinction like 'main business'. They apparently do everything, even colo. Want a third of a rack or full? If 'retail' metal is too pricey, try their 'server auction' with older equipment.

I just want to know what the questioner means is all. I view on-prem as _not_ meaning in the providers data center.

I view bare metal as meaning not virtualized.

Another related but not identical dimension is dedicated or shared.

Hetzner offers options in all those dimensions, but not in the price the question mentions.

I think a lot of people would consider having a rack at a colo to be "on-prem". I usually thought of that term meaning you're renting space and the services provided are redundant/reliable power, a public internet drop (or multiple), and physical security. Where you need to rack it yourself, run your own networking gear, etc.

I don't see how that's too functionally different from having a suite at a commercial office building, save for the fact the power and data isn't going to be nearly as reliable. It's just your "suite" is only a bit more than 19" wide.

> Hetzner offers options in all those dimensions, but not in the price the question mentions.

Again, incorrect (sorry). $30/m as opposed to $20. Their mistake, I suppose. /s Call it a typo and move on. Rhetorical: how that confuses the question for you, confuses me.

Before we bemoan 'a 50% cost increase', consider: this does quadruple the memory. An additional 48GB on the dedicated non-virtualized box. See: https://www.hetzner.com/sb/

IMO, the $10 on top of $20 is a pittance. Beyond the memory, bonus points: a spare SSD. A small price to reduce administrivia and gain redundancy!

Anyway, pedantry aside, all of this is the question: what does your value judgement look like? You're clearly somewhat familiar with the offerings. Hopefully more-so, now.

While I'm rambling/have the floor, some tangents:

    1. it hasn't made a lot of sense/cents to offer a dedicated *physical* machine with 16GB of memory in quite some time. Now, Cloud? Absolutely. Simplifies Tetris. Physical, though? A knock-off Tamagotchi might make more money after considering power, IPs, and module density for the DDR generation/platform.

    2. I can see reason for hesitation with Hetzner. While I'm a happy customer, they're well-known for being *very* thorough with identification during on-boarding. To the degree that many are uncomfortable.

When someone says “bare metal” to me, it implies that virtualization is a problem for their workloads. I’d be very surprised if there was a mass increase in workloads that was the case for. I’d be surprised if most of Hetzners existing non-virtualization customers even care.

When someone says “on premise” I assume they mean they are running some part of the premise. Whether they are leasing rack space in a broader data center or not, I agree that it’s a continuum, but I’d expect on premise to include negotiating energy and network as part.

To me, the more interesting question for this conversation is a)how are you paying for compute, are you doing long term lease/purchase of servers or are you getting short term provisioning of a standard sku and b) are you using “value added” services. Are you provisioning your own data warehouses, specialized database clusters etc, or are you using a managed service?

The distinction between a vm on a hyper scalar and per hour provisioning of hetzner compute (virtualized or not) seems pretty straightforward and I’d be shocked if there was some mass migration of those workloads away from the big clouds.

I have done workloads where virtualization very much matters and the physical locality of the servers makes a big difference and we are seeing the opposite happen, the cloud providers are dipping their toe in that market which has been closed to them.

When you get dedicated servers from them that's exactly what you get: you're renting physical servers, which you manage yourself. And they've been in this business for decades. The VMs offering is much more recent.

They have a cloud product called dedicated as well. I’m not sure what the questioner is arming about. I shouldn’t have said it’s their main business though.

Going by financials alone, no, public cloud providers aren’t remotely losing ground. That being said, organizations being run in rational and objective manners (instead of chasing buzzwords and fads) are increasingly looking at “right-sizing” their technology estates and moving them to more rational places, depending on workloads or other needs.

Public cloud, like all technologies, is little more than a tool. You don’t have to use it at all if you don’t want to, and even if you use it all the time for everything (as many customers do), you’re free to re-evaluate your use cases and migrate accordingly (depending on the services you consume).

With rising discussions about Big Tech monopolies, shifting geopolitical tensions, an increased focus on sovereignty, and a swath of economic factors that incentivize tighter budgets, the expectation is that workload migration and reshoring will continue to be an important topic for stakeholders well into the 2030s. Whether that means moving on-prem entirely for stable/non-scaling workloads, moving to a regional VPS for compliance, or changing CSPs entirely to avoid adversaries, the reality is that this discourse isn’t going away.

No, not yet, but People are starting to get the cold shower treatment they needed. Cloud services make sense for two groups of companies:

1. Huge multi-billion dollar corporations where the overhead of hiring 1000 hardware engineers to manage the... hardware is not worth the trouble/effort.

2. Fresh, 2.5 people-involved startups that need to ship a product asap and cannot afford to waste their time on infrastructure.

Everyone in-between however - bare-metal, be it rented, bought second hand and shoved in a collocation datacenter - it makes a lot more sense. For the money you'd spend on AWS/Azure/GCP in a year, in most cases you can get the equivalent refurbished servers you'd need, set them up and toss them in a datacenter, where you get full control over your own data and infrastructure and probably be left with cash to spare - the cold shower I was referring to.

Cloud is not losing ground but also Cloud computing is also not suitable for every business problem. Its killer feature for businesses with fluctuating usage profiles and "busy" seasons. Think like a tax related application for businesses, in the US, they have to file quarterly and annual. There are probably busy seasons where there would likely be more activity so a cloud compute environment where you can scale up to handle the load with a couple commands is ideal and then scale it down (and lower your costs) during slow times.

Indie hackers and small < 10 people startups don't need cloud. However its easier to get moving and scale up and you can just tie in all sorts of other services to make your life easier. If you're on-prem or managing VMs you need to figure out a lot of infrastructure things, networking, security, logging, failover, etc.

Then there is transferring risk. If you host your own infrastructure and you have an outage unrelated to HW or data center, that is entirely on you and to be honest will probably happen more frequently than using cloud. When your cloud provider is down, if its a household name, everyone already knows because everything else they use is probably having issues too. Much easier explanation to customers, they likely won't leave over a cloud outage.

I’ve found the combination of Netcup (either tier of offering has been wonderful ) combined with Cloudron gives me the best of both worlds. A marketplace one click app deployment and resources I can scale up or down as needed.

I’m building a business around that offering (turnkey VPS + Cloudron + Backblaze) as I think that gives everyone “cloud” but sovereign. For $250.00 a month.

I would say it depends on the effort to cost savings ratio. I moved my most expensive servers there because that’s where it made the most sense. If it totals considerable amounts of money it is absolutely worth the extra effort, but it is not worth it if you only have a handful of t4g.mediums.

> Do you think the cloud is actually losing ground?

No. What you are reading is just few snowflakes here and there, but there's no snow storm. Will that change? Hard to say. I have not seen any information that would throw shade on cloud for new projects to avoid it. So definitely no changes in this decade.

If you are using either Amplify or Vercel, you’re a really small developer that isn’t moving the needle.

yes and no

definitely seeing the weaknesses of cloud these days -- it is not a one-stop solution, and the costs are often comically, terribly, absurdly high

otoh, i'm in some regulated industries and being able to get out of dealing with unions and into a regulated-approved cloud situation is very useful for many things.

it's a true hybrid model and it's a challenge, but that challenge is often far, far cheaper than a pure cloud model, and pure cloud is not exactly uncomplicated.

plus like 2/3 of what we do does not need complicated CI/CD pipelines -- most business tasks don't.

This would be quite funny since _I’ve been using bare metal the whole time_. But I don’t think it’s as simple as that.

dhh spent 3 years moving from AWS to bare mental to save $2M and in the process completely missed the AI wave. Opportunity cost is real.

$2M credit on OpenAI seems like a good start to catch-up

What do you mean missed the AI wave? Nothing stops them from implementing AI features.

What does “missing the AI wave” mean?

Running up the hill when the Tsunami warning goes off?