Can someone explain 2 to me. How is a managed private cloud different from full cloud? Like you are still using AWS or Azure but you are keeping all your operation in a bundled, portable way, so you can leave that provider easily at any time, rather than becoming very dependent on them? Is it like staying provider-agnostic but still cloud based?

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adamcharnock 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

To put it plainly: We deploy a Kubernetes cluster on Hetzner dedicated servers and become your DevOps team (or a part thereof).

It works because bare metal is about 10% the cost of cloud, and our value-add is in 1) creating a resilient platform on top of that, 2) supporting it, 3) being on-call, and 4) being or supporting your DevOps team.

This starts with us providing a Kubernetes cluster which we manage, but we also take responsibility for the services run on it. If you want Postgres, Redis, Clickhouse, NATS, etc, we'll deploy it and be SLA-on-call for any issues.

If you don't want to deal with Kubernetes then you don't have to. Just have your software engineers hand us the software and we'll handle deployment.

Everything is deployed on open source tooling, you have access to all the configuration for the services we deploy. You have server root access. If you want to leave you can do.

Our customers have full root access, and our engineers (myself included) are in a Slack channel with you engineers.

And, FWIW, it doesn't have to be Hetzner. We can colocate or use other providers, but Hetzner offer excellent bang-per-buck.

Edit: And all this is included in the cluster price, which comes out cheaper than the same hardware on the major cloud providers

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mancerayder 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You give customers root but you're on call when something goes tits up?

You're a brave DevOps team. That would cause a lot of friction in my experience, since people with root or other administrative privileges do naughty things, but others are getting called in on Saturday afternoon.

	▲	belthesar an hour ago \| parent [-]
		From a platform risk perspective, each tenant has dedicated resources, so it's their platform to blow up. If a customer with root access blows up their own system, then the resources from the MSP to fix it are billable, and the after-action meetings would likely include a review of whether that access is appropriate, if additional training is needed to prevent those issues in the future (also billable), or if the customer-provider relationship is the right fit. Will the on-call resource be having a bad time fixing someone else's screw up? Yeah, and having been that guy before, I empathize. The business can and should manage this relationship however, so that it doesn't become an undue burden on their support teams. A customer platform that is always getting broken at 4pm on a Friday when an overzealous customer admin is going in and deciding to run arbitrary kubectl commands takes support capacity away from other customers when a major incident happens, regardless of how much you're making in support billing.

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Annatar 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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victorbjorklund 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Instead of using the Cloud's own Kubernetes service, for example, you just buy the compute and run your own Kubernetes cluster. At a certain scale that is going to be cheaper if you have to know how. And since you are no longer tied to which services are provided and you just need access to compute and storage. you can also shop around for better prices than Amazon or Azure since you can really go to any provider of a VPS.