HN user
We at ayedo[0] are specialized for this kind of migration away from inflated hyperscalers onto European cloud providers like Hetzner, IONOS, Plusserver etc. we provide the missing cloud-native services like databases, storage, loadbalancing, etc so teams don’t need to adjust that much.
[0] https://ayedo.de
Greatest irony of the industrial age: humans hired to operate machines.
You might also want to review https://loopback.cloud for that purpose
You might want to check https://loopback.cloud if you’re interested in managed k8s with customized infra on Hetzner. They‘re a German company specialized in that.
Spoiler: Shameless plug, but might be helpful for people
I understand most of the commentators, as well as OP, are probably looking to not spend too much time and money on their hosting infra. While that makes sense in the beginning, there might be a point in your successful journey where you want to hand over your operation duties to someone skilled and focus on building software because your business starts depending on safe and well-maintained infrastructure.
If you're looking for something between Heroku and AWS (both in terms of pricing and scalability) but based on K8s, with direct access to skilled platform engineers and personal support, you might want to check out https://www.ayedo.de/cloud/
Hey, you should check out https://www.ayedo.de - german company, own datacenters, but also able to provide managed services on top of HETZNER.
At https://www.ayedo.de we provide managed containers on top of Hetzner for a flat fee per node and it's managed by actual people, not just click-ops you need to take care for yourself eventually.
If that’s the only reason, we offer managed databases of many flavors on hetzner. https://www.ayedo.de
I happen to run a company that specializes in this: https://www.ayedo.de
Glad I found this, thanks for posting it. Looks great.
I use Polycrate [1] in conjunction with Ansible to create complex / monolithic systems with Docker / Swarm and to create a simpler interface for the end user than docker compose provides.
My company [1] offers this as a managed services and we’re very happy with hetzners offerings for the K8s ecosystem. Fairly easy to use a variety of tools to get K8s up and running reliably (we roll our own solution though)
If you need managed K8s and Kafka (and pretty much anything else you can self host), my company [1] provides just that with 5x16 real human support.
https://microplatforms.de is a growing collection of DevOps/Platform Engineering/SRE content.
Interesting perspective that I’d like to challenge. Many European companies now face a future in which they’re banned from using US cloud services due to GDPR. Fixing that problem seems like having high impact.
I've been working in the field - and for VW specifically - for the past couple of years and am constantly amazed by how far they are actually behind in terms of software and overall technical infrastructure.
Especially germans are too stuck in their industrial past - we don't really understand the value and leverage of software for business cases.
The car industry is built upon great designers and engineers, outsourcing the actual production of parts to other entities - they're not really used to building anything on their own, they just assemble things. I've written about this here [1].
While this way of thinking isn't limited to automakers, they're the ones that will suffer the most from it in the future. True innovation has been lost to the industry decades ago and is additionally blocked by holding on to the status quo instead of experimenting with and developing new things.
I believe this stems from the fact that most of our big businesses are run by MBAs with no real understanding for trends and even less for the speed at which the world moves forward in terms of technology.
Diess himself at least tried to push something forward others have neglected since the 90s. Not sure how Blume will approach this, but since he's grown inside the VW bubble for almost 30 years I would not assume that he can drive any kind of real innovation forward.
[1] https://derfabianpeter.substack.com/p/europe-and-the-cloud
They didn’t call it secure as per your initial quote. They say it is designed to have a small attack surface. You missed to acknowledge that security means different things for different contexts. Besides, it’s a free offering, clearing issues with insecurities other offerings have. If you want something to be more secure, you can point out flaws you find in the intended way (filing issues) which might help improve the situation. Calling it out the way you did (probably without trying the tool and even more likely without having substantial knowledge of better approachable alternatives in the space) doesn’t help at all.
Funny part is that „competent generalists“ (those Brent-style types) are very rare and most technology needs to be designed for incompetent specialists. Also funny is that these generalists typically build as if everyone has their own skillset which renders many systems unusable once Brent has left the building.
As someone building software for a living I fully agree with your decision to not go full OSS. It’s always a hefty discussion but I feel most of the people only exist on the receiving end of software and do not have to worry how a license impacts real life distribution. Big corp (I’m from Germany) DOES hesitate to go with any form of non-Apache-2 licensed OSS software. In Germany often times OSS is even discouraged if there’s no commercial support for it.
I understand the emotions people have regarding licenses that do allow them to work with software as they please - but I also think it’s useless to argue around licensing of a software instead of focusing on the good it can do. Something being proprietary has NO impact on your choice to buy it when outside of the software world. Why does it here?
Starting your day with „what’s your priority today“ is the basis of many engineering orgs these days. Most of the time it’s not a lack of planning but a desire to overplan that leads to these daily introspectives.
I really like that approach. Thanks for validating it publicly so I feel less like living an antipattern when hosting data next to code.
Sounds familiar.
This comment made me flip. Just signed up for a 10 year archive account.
Never used pinboard but frequently enjoy and admire the whole story and the level of dedication that flows into it. It’s like watching the story of „UP“ (the movie) happening in the internet.
Most businesses are neither fair nor transparent in their business decisions which is often interpreted as a sign of strength and thus fosters trust by users. Moves like this are uncommon and could / should give us faith in the product, but don’t , because we interpret transparency as a sign of weakness.
For those arguing that asking for money is somewhat a moral question: try to run anything someone relies on for more than year, then come back discussing the right topics.
Second that. Lame old people skills are the single most effective thing I’ve learned as a founder. Nothing else made a real difference.
It’s funny that your questions all imply that this should be a „solved“ problem while you can’t even grasp the complexity of reliably serving arbitrary software applications to arbitrary consumers. All that „legacy burden“ isn’t so legacy and for every layer of abstraction that makes all of this look less complicated, many highly skilled people put in a lot of effort.
Can you give management a single good reason to waste hours of time migrating away from a working product because you’re disappointed?
If 240 additional bucks a year for a product that continuously moved features from higher to lower tiers for years now is too much for you then maybe you should adjust your expectations towards Enterprise software in general.
Could you elaborate on complexity estimations? Not sure what it means.
I’m running https://www.p3r.one
I’m building Open Source tooling in the DevOps area and custom SaaS platforms for startups. Doing this from germany and making 100% of my income with it.
His main point was about not owing his time to someone. Not something. I can totally relate to that perspective. I value my time over anything else and it is apparent that money, if you have enough of it and use it wisely, gives you power over how that time is being used. Especially if you’re looking to the future.
It’s a matter of perspective though, as always, and to me, happiness lies in being able to set my agenda and share power over it with whom I choose, not with whom I’m forced to share it with.
PS: Looking for jobs as Head of Product or CPO https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24942045