<story><title>Hetzner Introduces ARM64 Cloud Servers</title><url>https://www.hetzner.com/press-release/arm64-cloud/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zackmorris</author><text>I implemented a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) on AWS with Elastic Container Service (ECS) using Terraform so that I could run Docker, and it ended up being about 2 orders of magnitude more expensive than Hetzner after all of the services were configured. For example, something as simple as AWS NAT Gateway costs $30 per month, and it can be challenging to get everything right if you don&amp;#x27;t use one. I haven&amp;#x27;t tried Heroku, but expect similar prices and nearly as high of a configuration burden.&lt;p&gt;So what&amp;#x27;s the point of all that? Seriously, one server with 16 cores and the memory bandwidth and storage speed of SSD drives should be able to serve many thousands of simultaneous requests and millions of users per month. I can&amp;#x27;t help but feel that the cloud infrastructure and microservice movement of the 2010s was.. a scam.&lt;p&gt;I just need a place to run Docker, similar to what we had with Linode for running a shell 20 years ago. And don&amp;#x27;t tell me how to set it all up. Just give me a turnkey Terraform (or Ansible-inspired declarative configuration management tool) setup that has stuff like load balancing and some degree of more advanced features like denial of service protection out of the box. What we used to think of as managed hosting, but open source, and with sane defaults for running standard suites like Laravel, Rails, etc.&lt;p&gt;I have to assume that I&amp;#x27;m just terribly out of it and something like this already exists. Otherwise I can&amp;#x27;t understand why someone doesn&amp;#x27;t just offer this and provide a way for us to pay them the millions of dollars we lose to spinning our wheels on cloud infrastructure with 1% utilization.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>simplotek</author><text>&amp;gt; So what&amp;#x27;s the point of all that? Seriously, one server with 16 cores and the memory bandwidth and storage speed of SSD drives should be able to serve many thousands of simultaneous requests and millions of users per month. I can&amp;#x27;t help but feel that the cloud infrastructure and microservice movement of the 2010s was.. a scam.&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;re just missing the whole point of why you need n&amp;gt;1 instances. You&amp;#x27;re focusing on what might be the least compelling reason for the majority of applications, which is scalability.&lt;p&gt;Reliability and fault tolerance is a major selling point, and you can&amp;#x27;t simply expect to have adequate performance in more than one region if you&amp;#x27;re providing your services out of a single box in a single data center. The laws of physics ensure your quality of service will suck.&lt;p&gt;Operations also compell you to have multiple instances, ranging from blue&amp;#x2F;green deployments to one-box deployment strategies. And are you going to allow your business to be down for significant amounts of time whenever you need to update your OS? How would you explain all that downtime to your boss&amp;#x2F;shareholders? Are the tens of dollars you save on infrastructure a good tradeoff?&lt;p&gt;Also, security is also a concern.  You&amp;#x27;re better off isolating your backend from frontend services, and software-defined networks aren&amp;#x27;t a silver bullet.&lt;p&gt;And in the end, are the tradeoffs of not designing your web services the right way really worth it?</text></comment>
<story><title>Hetzner Introduces ARM64 Cloud Servers</title><url>https://www.hetzner.com/press-release/arm64-cloud/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zackmorris</author><text>I implemented a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) on AWS with Elastic Container Service (ECS) using Terraform so that I could run Docker, and it ended up being about 2 orders of magnitude more expensive than Hetzner after all of the services were configured. For example, something as simple as AWS NAT Gateway costs $30 per month, and it can be challenging to get everything right if you don&amp;#x27;t use one. I haven&amp;#x27;t tried Heroku, but expect similar prices and nearly as high of a configuration burden.&lt;p&gt;So what&amp;#x27;s the point of all that? Seriously, one server with 16 cores and the memory bandwidth and storage speed of SSD drives should be able to serve many thousands of simultaneous requests and millions of users per month. I can&amp;#x27;t help but feel that the cloud infrastructure and microservice movement of the 2010s was.. a scam.&lt;p&gt;I just need a place to run Docker, similar to what we had with Linode for running a shell 20 years ago. And don&amp;#x27;t tell me how to set it all up. Just give me a turnkey Terraform (or Ansible-inspired declarative configuration management tool) setup that has stuff like load balancing and some degree of more advanced features like denial of service protection out of the box. What we used to think of as managed hosting, but open source, and with sane defaults for running standard suites like Laravel, Rails, etc.&lt;p&gt;I have to assume that I&amp;#x27;m just terribly out of it and something like this already exists. Otherwise I can&amp;#x27;t understand why someone doesn&amp;#x27;t just offer this and provide a way for us to pay them the millions of dollars we lose to spinning our wheels on cloud infrastructure with 1% utilization.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nine_k</author><text>Cloud is about elasticity. At ${work} we spin up a ton of EC2 instances in anticipation of huge traffic spikes that happen predictably several times a day, in different regions, and spin them down afterwards.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s also about simplicity. Many services come pre-configured on.AWS, with clustering, failover, backups, etc already present.&lt;p&gt;When you are small, you can sysadmin your server fine, and you don&amp;#x27;t yet need the cloud.&lt;p&gt;When you are colossal, you want everything custom, and the cloud would cost you a huge amount, so you go for your own servers (and possibly datacenters).&lt;p&gt;But for the midrange, the expense of hiring several more SREs to handle dedicated servers is usually higher than the entire AWS bill, and the cloud looks very reasonable.</text></comment>