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Aurornistoday at 4:01 PM1 replyview on HN

These articles are popular where there's a mismatch between application requirements and the solution chosen. When someone over-engineers their architecture to be enterprise-grade (substitute your own definition of enterprise-grade) when really they were running a hobby project or a small business where a day of downtime every once in a while just means your customers will come back the next day, going all-out on cloud architecture is maybe not necessary. That's why you see so many comments from people arguing that downtime isn't always a big deal or that risking an outage is fine: There are a lot of applications where this is kind of true.

The confusing part about this article is the emphasis on a zero-downtime migration toward a service that isn't really ideal for uptime. It wouldn't be that expensive to add a little bit of architecture on the Hetzner side to help with this. I guess if you're doing a migration and you're paid salary or your time is free-ish, doing the migration in a zero downtime way is smart. It's a little funny to see the emphasis on zero downtime juxtaposed to the architecture they chose where uptime depends on nothing ever failing


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j45today at 4:26 PM

Downtime is a strawman.

Clever architecture will always beat cleverly trying to pick only one cloud.

Being cloud agnostic is best.

This means setting up a private cloud.

Hosted servers, and managed servers are perfectly capable of near zero downtime. this is because it's the same equipment (or often more consumer grade) that the "cloud" works on and plans for even more failure.

Digital Ocean definitely does not guarantee zero downtime. That's a lot of 9's.

It's simple to run well established tools like Proxmox on bare metal that will do everything Digital Ocean promises, and it's not susceptible to attacks, or exploits where the shared memory and CPU usage will leak what customers believe is their private VPS.

Nothing ever failing in the case of a tool like Proxmox is, install it on two servers, one VPS exists on both nodes (you connect both servers as nodes), click high availability, and it's generally up and running. Put cloudflare in front of it like the best preference practices of today.

If you're curious about this, there's some pretty eye opening and short videos on Proxmox available on Youtube that are hard to unsee.

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