Can any Hetzner user, please explain your workflow on Hetzner?

I use Hetzner, Contabo, Time4VPS and other platforms in pretty much the same way (as IaaS VPS providers on top of which I run software, as opposed to SaaS/PaaS), but here's a quick glance at how I do things, with mostly cloud agnostic software.

deploy from source repo? Terraform?

Personally, I use Gitea for my repos and Drone CI for CI/CD.

Gitea: https://gitea.io/en-us/ ↗

Drone CI: https://www.drone.io/ ↗

Some might prefer Woodpecker due to licensing: https://woodpecker-ci.org/ ↗ but honestly most solutions out there are okay, even Jenkins.

Then I have some sort of a container cluster on the servers, so I can easily deploy things: I still like Docker Swarm (projects like CapRover might be nice to look at as well), though many might enjoy the likes of K3s or K0s more (lightweight Kubernetes clusters).

Docker Swarm: https://docs.docker.com/engine/swarm/ ↗ (uses the Compose spec for manifests)

K3s: https://k3s.io/ ↗

K0s: https://k0sproject.io/ ↗ though MicroK8s and others are also okay.

I also like having something like Portainer to have a GUI to manage the clusters: https://www.portainer.io/ ↗ for Kubernetes Rancher might offer more features, but will have a higher footprint

It even supports webhooks, so I can do a POST request at the end of a CI run and the cluster will automatically pull and launch the latest tagged version of my apps: https://docs.portainer.io/user/docker/services/webhooks ↗

keep software up to date? ex: Postgres, OS

I build my own base container images and rebuild them (with recent package versions) on a regular basis, which is automatically scheduled: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/using-ubuntu-as-the-base-for-all-of-my-containers ↗

Drone CI makes this easy to have happen in the background, as long as I don't update across major versions, or Maven decides to release a new version and remove their old version .tar.gz archives from the downloads site for some reason, breaking my builds and making me update the URL: https://docs.drone.io/cron/ ↗

Some images like databases etc. I just proxy to my Nexus instance, version upgrades are relatively painless most of the time, at least as long as I've set up the persistent data directories correctly.

do load balancing? built-in load balancer?

This is a bit more tricky. I use Apache2 with mod_md to get Let's Encrypt certificates and Docker Swarm networking for directing the incoming traffic across the services: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/how-and-why-to-use-apache-httpd-in-2022 ↗

Some might prefer Caddy, which is another great web server with automatic HTTPS: https://caddyserver.com/ ↗ but the Apache modules do pretty much everything I need and the performance has never actually been too bad for my needs. Up until now, applications themselves have always been the bottleneck, actually working on a blog post about comparing some web servers in real world circumstances.

However, making things a bit more failure resilient might involve just paying Hetzner (in this case) to give you a load balancer: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/load-balancer ↗ which will make everything less painless once you need to scale.

Why? Because doing round robin DNS with the ACME certificate directory accessible and synchronized across multiple servers is a nuisance, although servers like Caddy attempt to get this working: https://caddyserver.com/docs/automatic-https#storage ↗ You could also get DNS-01 challenges working, but that needs even more work and integration with setting up TXT records. Even if you have multiple servers for resiliency, not all clients would try all of the IP addresses if one of the servers is down, although browsers should: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/12704 ↗

So if you care about HTTPS certificates and want to do it yourself with multiple servers having the same hostname, you'll either need to get DNS-01 working, do some messing around with shared directories (which may or may not actually work), or will just need to get a regular commercial cert that you'd manually propagate to all of the web servers.

From there on out it should be a regular reverse proxy setup, in my case Docker Swarm takes care of the service discovery (hostnames that I can access).

handle scaling? Terraform?

None, I manually provision how many nodes I need, mostly because I'm too broke to hand over my wallet to automation.

They have an API that you or someone else could probably hook up: https://docs.hetzner.cloud/ ↗

automate backups? ex: databases, storage. Do you use provided backups and snapshots?

I use bind mounts for all of my containers for persistent storage, so the data is accessible on the host directly.

Then I use something like BackupPC to connect to those servers (SSH/rsync) and pull data to my own backup node, which then compresses and deduplicates the data: https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/ ↗

It was a pain to setup, but it works really well and has saved my hide dozens of times. Some might enjoy Bacula more: https://www.bacula.org/ ↗

maintain security? built-in firewall and DDoS protection?

I personally use Apache2 with ModSecurity and the OWASP ruleset, to act as a lightweight WAF: https://owasp.org/www-project-modsecurity-core-rule-set/ ↗

You might want to just cave in and go with Cloudflare for the most part, though: https://www.cloudflare.com/waf/ ↗

Are we talking about their cloud services or dedicated servers? I (and a couple of clients) use their dedicated servers, the procedure is the same as with any bare metal hosting. Here's the setup of my own servers (one at Falkenstein data center and one at Helsinki). My use case is small apps, with a couple hundred concurrent users at most. If you need a more dramatic infrastructure that scales up automatically and auto-deploys software left and right, that's a whole different ball game.

- Proxmox as the base OS, stock install. Close every port except SSH, 80, 443 (alternatively you may want to go with Wireguard instead of SSH). There is an nginx instance running in front of the containers, it passes data along to them as per config. Otherwise, nothing is reachable from the outside.

- Servers are on Proxmox containers, mostly also Nginx, some Nodejs, some other, you know the drill. The containers are pretty low overhead, so you can implement basically any deployment strategy in that environment. They're also easy to back up and to replicate to other machines.

keep software up to date? ex: Postgres, OS

I run a periodic "apt update && apt upgrade -y && apt autoremove -y" as a cron job on most containers. Some configurations tend to break occasionally, so I do those specific ones manually or with additional scripts. I have a repo of scripts and snippets that I use everywhere, just little hacks that accumulated over the years because they automate useful things.

do load balancing? built-in load balancer?

That depends on where your loads are, and what the structural needs of your applications are. If this is about external web requests to a mostly read-heavy application, I highly suggest using a CDN such as Cloudflare rather than rolling your own. That being said, Nginx makes load balancing pretty painless.

automate backups? ex: databases, storage. Do you use provided backups and snapshots?

Their storage offering is pretty okay, but I would consider restoring a whole-system backup a last resort. Proxmox has built-in support for container snapshots/backups, which gives you more granular control. These snapshots are also easy to rsync periodically to another host. If the physical machine dies, you just start the container on another host from a recent backup. There are HA options for this on Proxmox if you link more than one host into a cluster (which is overkill for most setups).

maintain security? built-in firewall and DDoS protection?

Close down your ports. No complicated firewall rules, either. Just block anything that isn't directed at one of your 3 necessary ports. With DDoS protection: don't roll your own, use a CDN. Also, install only things you can audit or come from a reasonably safe source. For instance, I would highly discourage running npm installs/updates unsupervised. If you have a production app that needs to work and needs to be reasonably secure, don't automatically pull data from free-for-all package managers - deploy them with reviewed or known-good versions hard locked (or deploy them with dependencies already included).

As a final tip: Hetzner servers come with RAID setups (usually RAID1). Monitor the status of those drives! If one fails, tell them to replace it. They will usually do it within the hour on a running system.

We use Docker Swarm for our deployments, so I will answer the questions based on that.

We have built some tooling around setting up and maintaining the swarm using ansible [0]. We also added some Hetzner flavour to that [1] which allows us to automatically spin up completely new clusters in a really short amount of time.

deploy from source repo:

- We use Azure DevOps pipelines that automate deployments based on environment configs living in an encrypted state in Git repos. We use [2] and [3] to make it easier to organize the deployments using `docker stack deploy` under the hood.

keep software up to date:

- We are currently looking into CVE scanners that export into prometheus to give us an idea of what we should update

load balancing:

- depending on the project, Hetzner LB or Cloudflare

handle scaling:

- manually, but i would love to build some autoscaler for swarm that interacts with our tooling [0] and [1]

automate backups:

- docker swarm cronjobs either via jobs with restart condition and a delay or [4]

maintain security:

- Hetzner LB is front facing. Communication is done via encrypted networks inside Hetzner private cloud networks

- [0] https://github.com/neuroforgede/swarmsible ↗

- [1] https://github.com/neuroforgede/swarmsible-hetzner ↗

- [2] https://github.com/neuroforgede/nothelm.py ↗

- [3] https://github.com/neuroforgede/docker-stack-deploy ↗

===================

EDIT - about storage:

We use cloud volumes.

For drivers:

We use https://github.com/costela/docker-volume-hetzner ↗ which is really stable.

CSI support for Swarm is in beta as well and already merged in the Hetzner CSI driver (https://github.com/hetznercloud/csi-driver/tree/main/deploy/docker-swarm ↗). There are some rough edges atm with Docker + CSI so I would stick with docker-volume-hetzner for now for prod usage.

Disclaimer: I contributed to both repos.

For dedicated servers:

- deploy from source repo? Terraform?

* local build server, which rsyncs to application servers (e.g. files), or through docker registry * scripts to start/stop/restart services * centralised database on which services run on which servers, which serves as base where specific applications run

- keep software up to date? ex: Postgres, OS

ansible for automated installs (through hetzner API) ansible scripts to execute commands on servers (e.g. update software, or adapt firewall when new hosts are being added)

- do load balancing? built-in load balancer? * proxy to route requests to multiple backend servers (e.g nginx) * flexi ip (needs to manually mapped to new server in case of failure over API, so you need to check yourself that the IP is reachable)

- handle scaling? Terraform?

* more servers

- automate backups? ex: databases, storage. Do you use provided backups and snapshots?

* Seperate hdfs cluster, which allows production nodes to write once and read data, but not delete/overwrite any data. * For less data, you could also use their backup servers. * The "backups and snapshots" feature you mention is only available for vservers, not for dedicated servers.

- maintain security? built-in firewall and DDoS protection?

* Hetzner router Firewall * Software firewall (managed through ansible) * Don't use their VLAN feature, as there seems to be often some problems with connectivity (see their forum). * Never had DDos issues

- monitoring of failures: * internal tool to monitor hardware and software issues (e.g. wrongly deployed software, etc...).

Not a Hetzner user, but I believe you can do pretty much anything you can use any other VPS for. I deploy all my stuff on a single server using https://lunni.dev/ ↗ (disclaimer: I'm also the author of Lunni). It is a web interface over Docker Swarm with sane defaults for working with web apps.

- Deploy from source repo: Lunni docs guide you how to setup CI building your repo as a docker image, and you can create a webhook that pulls it and redeploys.

- Scaling, load balancing: in theory you can just throw more servers in the swarm, tweak your configuration a bit and it should work. However, I've yet to run past what a single, moderately beefy server can handle :')

- Automate backups: definitely on my roadmap! Right now I'm configuring them manually on critical services, and doing them manually every now and then using the Vackup script.

- Maintain security: Docker's virtual networks acts as a de-facto firewall here. In Lunni, you only expose services you need to the reverse proxy (for HTTP), and if you absolutely must expose some ports directly (e. g. SSH for Git), you have to explicitly list them.

Some other similar alternatives to consider: Dokku, Coolify, Portainer with Traefik / Caddy / nginx-gen. I'll be glad if you choose Lunni though :-) Let me know if you have any questions!