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Comment by anonacct37 | Hacker News Reader

Yes. Look at https://www.packet.net/bare-metal/ for bare metal boxes provisioned in less time than an ec2 instance.

Or if you want to go old school, cheaper, and less sexy/api driven: https://www.delimiter.com/

If you shop, for around 30-40 a month you can get 16 cores, 32gb ram, and a 120GB ssd or 1-2TB spinny disk.

I migrated to packet all bright eye'd and full of wonder...terrible mistake...outages on a weekly basis and they have no availability zones so when outage occurs the entire region is down. Replicating across regions failed our latency requirements so that was a no-go.

I can't stress this enough. Having to roll your own / administrate a logging system, Database, load balancers, autoscale, file storage far exceeds the added cost of the cloud. Now that GCE has sustained usage discounts of 39% it makes no sense to go bare metal right now.

Quick back of the napkin math, but Google Compute Engine (while it is shared) is significantly less expensive than Packet. This is just comparing purely on price though.

  Packet - $292/mo
    4 cores
    32 GB memory
    128 GB SSD

  Google Compute Engine - $176/mo
     $156 - custom-4-32-extended
      4 cores / 32 GB memory 
     $20 - 120 GB SSD storage

"4 cores" on GCE means 4 hyperthreads, or 2 physical cores.

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/machine-types

> For the n1 series of machine types, a virtual CPU is implemented as a single hardware hyper-thread on a 2.6 GHz Intel Xeon E5 (Sandy Bridge), 2.5 GHz Intel Xeon E5 v2 (Ivy Bridge), 2.3 GHz Intel Xeon E5 v3 (Haswell), 2.2 GHz Intel Xeon E5 v4 (Broadwell), or 2.0 GHz Intel Skylake (Skylake).

A raspberry pi would also be more than enough for many use cases and can be hosted for ~$40/year: https://raspberry-hosting.com/en/order.

I'd have one (or more) already if I didn't live on the opposite side of the world to the data center.

also scaleway.com (they have API, but no user-data).

IMO, docker and container orchestration spells a bright future for bare-metal boxes like these, as you won't need cloudformation, etc..

But I still see few alternatives to S3, many vendors offers block devices, but only the big clouds offer blob storage. Backup and restore from blob storage makes recovery from crash pretty easy.

How do open source solutions like minio.io on bare metal compare to s3? I don't have much experience with any of those, but it seems like a compatible solution.

I haven't tried it either... but the nice thing with S3 is zero maintenance. A disk or machine dies it's not my problem.

The not-my-problem aspect is really powerful.

b2 is a really good alternative to s3.

I assume you mean: backblaze.com/b2

I would be concerned with how good the connection is... Ie. if you use packet or scaleway, how stable/fast is the connection to b2.

S3 being internal network at EC2 is a killer feature too :)

How does docker replace cloudformation? Don't you still need something that says "hey you are running out of capacity soon, time to add more hardware for your software to run on"

There has to be something that adds more bare-metal for your docker containers to run on when the existing bare-metal reaches capacity, right?

A fully containerized setup allows one to use something like Kubernetes to do such orchestration.

K8s is getting pretty easy to setup these days.

I was asking about once your bare metal capacity reaches its limit. At some point you need to provision more bare metal and expand the total resources kubernetes can consume with docker.

Cloudformation, to me at least, is the power to expand resources for large traffic events. Most of the time you can get by with a small amount of instances but its nice when it scales up to hundreds of instances in minutes.

The bare metal equivalent would be to buy something that can handle the peak load from the start, right?

>Cloudformation, to me at least, is the power to expand resources for large traffic events. Most of the time you can get by with a small amount of instances but its nice when it scales up to hundreds of instances in minutes.

This is not what CloudFormation does. CloudFormation allows a declarative way to express a group of AWS resources to be created and coupled together. There's nothing that's quite exactly the same as CloudFormation, but stock Kubernetes is quite close, since you effectively describe what resources you want in individual declarative YAML/JSON files. However, there's nothing standard in Kubernetes for coupling them together into one thing equivalent to a Stack in CloudFormation.

Maybe we are talking about different things, but I use CloudFormation to autoscale ec2 instances based on avg CPU load over a period of time

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuid...

I rent a dedi arm box from scaleway. It's been up for 700 days, and serves about 30k req/month. I couldn't be happier for the price.

For 30k req/month heroku could a better choice. The cost here is maintenance and backup.

Note: I'm still hopeful that things like k8n will make running stateful containers on random metal easy without huge investments in configuration for backup and reliability.

curious - but how would heroku be a win? I know nothing of heroku, so not insulting it.

I pay about $3.50/mo total to run these services.

That price for that config sounds amazing. Any pointers?

Right this second: https://cc.delimiter.com/cart/dedicated-servers/

$50/month 24GB ram, 16 threads, 2TB HD, gigabit uplink (20TB/month free).

It's not hard to wait until they have a sale and/or coupons and/or pay upfront yearly to get a similar config for 30-40.

(disclaimer: these servers are pretty "unmanaged")

Or packet gives you a completely "cloud/api-driven" experience that's still on bare metal and reasonably priced compared to AWS or DO.

Where do you find the discounts/sales?

Here I guess? https://cc.delimiter.com/cart/clearance-servers/&step=0

webhostingtalk

32€ quadcore 32GB RAM, 2x3TB HDD: hetzner.de in their "second hand market"

I've been shopping for a few months, and I can't find 16 physical cores (32 threads) for less than about $70/mo.

If you're talking about a single server, I doubt you will find anything cheaper. Compare it to AWS, something like c4.8xlarge will cost you $1.591/hr, or $735.84/month reserved.

What is that $70/mo server with 16 cores?

The cheapest I see is Kimsufi KS-5 8-core for $36/month. There's also an EU hoster Netcup that offers RS 4000 8-core for around $33.

Less time than ec2? Last time I test drove packet it was around 10 min

That, unfortunately, can be less time than it takes AWS to provision the disks on some of their larger instance...

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