It's just a single data point, but for me that's a pretty good record.
It's not because Hetzner is miraculously better at infrastructure, it's because physical servers are way simpler than the extremely complex software and networking systems that AWS provides.
Or, rather, it's your fault when the complex software and networking systems you deployed on top of those physical servers go wrong (:
So Hetzner is OK for the overly complex as well, if you wish to do so.
This was extra painful, because I wasn't using one of the OS that is blessed by Hetzner, so it requires a remote install. Remote installs require a system that can run their Java web plugin, and that have a stable and fast enough connection to not time out. The only way I have reliably gotten them to work is by having an ancient Linux VM that was also running in Hetzner, and had the oldest Firefox version I could find that still supported Java in the browser.
My fault for trying to use what they provide in a way that is outside their intended use, and props to them for letting me do it anyway.
I learned a long time ago that servers should be an output of your declarative server management configuration, not something that is the source of any configuration state. In other words, you should have a system where you can recreate all your servers at any time.
In your case, I would indeed consider starting with one of the OS base installs that they provide. Much as I dislike the Linux distribution I'm using now, it is quite popular, so I can treat it as a common denominator that my ansible can start from.
There’s a ton of momentum associated with the prior dominance, but between the big misses on AI, a general slow pace of innovation on core services, and a steady stream of top leadership and engineers moving elsewhere they’re looking quite vulnerable.
I'm not sure what feature they're really missing, but my favorite is the way they handle AWS Fargate. The other cloud providers have similar offerings but I find Fargate to have almost no limitations when compared to the others.
It means no longer being hungry. Then you start making mistakes. You stop innovating. And then you slowly lose whatever kind of edge you had, but you don't realize that you're losing it until it's gone
The improvements to core services at AWS hasn't really happened at the same pace post covid as it did prior, but that could also have something to do with overall maturity of the ecosystem.
Although it's also largely the case that other cloud providers have also realized that it's hard for them to compete against the core competency of other companies, whereas they'd still be selling the infrastructure the above services are run on.
As much as I might not like AWS, I think they’ll remain #1 for the foreseeable future. Despite the reasons the guy listed.
Simultaneously too confused to be able to make their own UX choices, but smart enough to understand the backend of your infrastructure enough to know why it doesn't work and excuses you for it.
I liked your point though!
In technically sophisticated organizations, this disconnect simply floats to higher levels (e.g. CEO vs. CTO rather than middle manager vs. engineer).
Unless you lose a significant amount of money per minute of downtime, there is no incentive to go multicloud.
And multicloud has its own issues.
In the end, you live with the fact that your service might be down a day or two per year.
This is hilarious. In the 90s we used to have services which ran on machines in cupboards which would go down because the cleaner would unplug them. Even then a day or two per year would be unacceptable.
This is alongside "live" reporting on the Israel/Gaza conflict as well as news about Epstein and the Louvre heist.
This is mainstream news.
Perhaps some parts of the migration haven't been completed, or there is still a central database in us-east1
Your margin is my opportunity indeed.
Hetzner has the better web interface and supposedly better uptime, but I've had no problems with either. Web interface not necessary at all either when using only ssh and paying directly.
I think I am more distributed then most of the AWS folks and it still is way cheaper.
Comments like this are so exaggerated that they risk moving the goodwill needle back to where it was before. Hetzner offers no service that is similar to DynamoDB, IAM or Lambda. If you are going to praise Hetzner as a valid alternative during a DynamoDB outage caused by DNS configuration, you would need to a) argue that Hetzner is a better option regarding DNS outages, b) Hetzner is a preferable option for those who use serverless offers.
I say this as a long-time Hetzner user. Herzner is indeed cheaper, but don't pretend that Herzner let's you click your way into a highly-availale nosql data store. You need non-trivial levels of you're ow work to develop, deploy, and maintain such a service.
The idea you can click your way to a highly available, production configured anything in AWS - especially involving Dynamo, IAM and Lambda - is something I've only heard from people who've done AWS quickstarts but never run anything at scale in AWS.
Of course nobody else offers AWS products, but people use AWS for their solutions to compute problems and it can be easy to forget virtually all other providers offer solutions to all the same problems.
With some services I'd agree with you, but DynamoDB and Lambda are easily two of their 'simplest' to configure and understand services, and two of the ones that scale the easiest. IAM roles can be decently complicated, but that's really up to the user. If it's just 'let the Lambda talk to the table' it's simple enough.
S3/SQS/Lambda/DynamoDB are the services that I'd consider the 'barebones' of the cloud. If you don't have all those, you're not a cloud provider, your just another server vendor.
I'll bite. Explain exactly what work you think you need to do to get your pick of service running on Hetnzer to have equivalent fault-tolerance to, say, a DynamoDB Global Table created with the defaults.
Plenty of heavy traffic, high redundancy applications exist without the need for AWS (or any other cloud providers) overpriced "bespoke" systems.
At some point in the scaling journey bare metal might be the right choice, but I get the feeling a lot of people here trivialize it.
I think you don't even understand the issue you are commenting on. It's irrelevant if you are Netflix or some guy playing with a tutorial. One of the key traits of serverless offerings is how it eliminates the need to manage and maintain a service or even worry about you have enough computational resources. You click a button to provision everything, you configure your clients to consume that service, and you are done.
If you stop to think about the amount of work you need to invest to even arrive at a point where you can actually point a client at a service, you'll be looking at what the value of serverless offerings.
Ironically, it's the likes of Netflix who can put together a case against using serverless offerings. They can afford to have their own teams managing their own platform services with the service levels they are willing to afford. For everyone else, unless you are in the business of managing and tuning databases or you are heavily motivated to save pocket change on a cloud provider bill, the decision process is neither that clear not favours running your own services.
And almost all of them need a database, a load balancer, maybe some sort of cache. AWS has got you covered.
Maybe some of them need some async periodic reporting tasks. Or to store massive files or datasets and do analysis on them. Or transcode video. Or transform images. Or run another type of database for a third party piece of software. Or run a queue for something. Or capture logs or metrics.
And on and on and and on. AWS has got you covered.
This is Excel all over again. "Excel is too complex and has too many features, nobody needs more than 20% of Excel. It's just that everyone needs a different 20%".
You will in both cases need specialized people.
The key thing you should ask yourself: do you need DynamoDB or Lambda? Like "need need" or "my resume needs Lambda".
If you read the message you're replying to, you will notice that I singled out IAM, Lambda, and DynamoDB because those services were affected by the outage.
If Hetzner is pushed as a better or even relevant alternative, you need to be able to explain exactly what you are hoping to say to Lambda/IAM/DynamoDB users to convince them that they would do better if they used Hetzner instead.
Making up conspiracy theories over CVs doesn't cut it. Either you know anything about the topic and you actually are able to support this idea, or you're an eternal September admission whose only contribution is noise and memes.
What is it?
Maybe not click, but Scylla’s install script [0] doesn’t seem overly complicated.
0: https://docs.scylladb.com/manual/stable/getting-started/inst...
Sure, if you configure offsite backups you can guard against this stuff, but with anything in life, you get what you pay for.
It's a server! What in the world is your friend doing running a single disk???
Ate a bare minimum they should have been running a mirror.
One thing to note is that there are some scheduled maintenances were we needed to react.
That might be datacenter dependant of course, since our root servers and cloud services are all hosted in Europe, but I really never understood why Hetzner is said to be less reliable
> 99.99% uptime infra significantly cheaper than the cloud.
I guess that's another person that has never actually worked in the domain (SRE/admin) but still wants to talk with confidence on the topic.
Why do I say that? Because 99.99% is frickin easy
That's almost one full hour of complete downtime per year.
It only gets hard in the 99.9999+ range ... And you rarely meet that range with cloud providers either as requests still fail for some reason, like random 503 when a container is decommissioned or similar
Admittedly they're getting fewer and fewer, but they exist.
The same is also true in GCP, so as much as I prefer GCP from a technical standpoint: the truth is, if you can't see it, it doesn't mean it goes away.
That's not necessarily ironic. Seems like you are suffering from recency bias.
Going forward I expect American companies to follow this European vibe, it's like the opposite of enshitification.
Why do you expect American companies to follow it then? >:)
I could find one or two downvoted or heavily critisized comments, but I can find more people mentioning the opposite.
Aws/cloud has similar outages too, but more redundancy and automatic failover/migrations that are transparent to customers happen. You don't have to worry about DDOS and many other admin burdens either.
YMMV, I'm just saying sometimes Aws makes sense, other times Hetzner does.
As long as the illusion that AWS/clouds are the only way to do things continues, their investment will keep being valuable and they will keep getting paid for (over?)engineering solutions based on such technologies.
The second that illusion breaks down, they become no better than any typical Linux sysadmin, or teenager ricing their Archlinux setup in their homelab.
I would say tech workers rather than "people" as they are the ones needing to interact with it the most
The truth is one under the age of 35 is able to configure a webserver any more, apparently. Especially now that static site generators are in vogue and you don't even need to worry about php-fpm.
In any case, in order for this to happen, someone would have to collect reliable data (not all big cloud providers like to publish precise data, usually they downlplay the outages and use weasel words like "some customers... in some regions... might have experienced" just not to admit they had an outage) and present stats comparing the availability of Heztner Cloud vs the big three.
