Hetzner partnering with Ampere to bring ARM systems to their cloud
In this technical retrospective (2022), @rglullis shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Pandemic Bubble (2020–2022)
COMMUNITY SCORE 71 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 30 comments
This seems like an interesting development and maybe could lead to even more affordable cloud offerings by Hetzner sometime down the line (of course the AI/ML spin of the article might imply something else, which is fine too).
As it stands, right now they seem like one of the most affordable hosts out there. In comparison, Contabo's UI is a bit ancient and apparently they overprovision resources, most other hosts like DigitalOcean/Vultr/Scaleway are all more expensive.
I guess Scaleway had Stardust instances which were really affordable but everything with higher specs was a bit less affordable, even though their managed services are pretty nice.
If it were more on topic, i'd ask what people here are using for when they want VPSes for a side project or something along those lines, though as it stands i'm all for seeing more ARM offerings, as long as running certain software on them isn't too much of a problem.
I am over the moon with announcement. Being allowed with to play with a dual socket 160 core Amprere machine at the an ARM HPC User group meeting was a super interesting experience.
I as an existing Hetzner customer just called up their hotline and it is not known whether these machines will also be made available with the Hetzner Cloud or just as dedicated machines. A truly exiting time to be alive.
If a european company offered a reliable and reasonably priced hetzner-based "cloud" with managed k8s, managed databases, object storage, networking and maybe some FaaS system I would use that in a heartbeat.
I'd try to build it if I had the right technical/sysadmin background. Seems like a realistic task for someone with a small, scrappy team who does.
Wouldn't RISC be better suited for web server workloads than CISC anyways? If that is correct then how come it hasn't dominated that sector?
Interesting! I'be been trying to get my hands on an Ampere server in Oracle cloud without any success... I hope I will be luckier with Hetzner.