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by heipei 1631 days ago
As long as you treat servers as cattle, you can use Hetzner's own load balancer service and then you don't have a SPOF that you manage yourself. Their LBs are advertised as redundant / fault tolerant.
1 comments

I don't know if it is possible to treat "Serverbörse" servers as cattle. They are all different. I know that k8s and Docker Swarm could in theory balance load between different machines, but never tried it in practice. But I had in practice some weird glitches with different CPU/motherboards/memory.

Also, comment I was replying to mentioned a 48 euro budget, it is a price of a single server.

i think the whole point of vm/container is to enable "servers as cattle"
Yes, but "Serverbörse" machines are very non-uniform, which may be bad for load balancing. See yourself: https://www.hetzner.com/sb
Still you can get a nice server with i7 cpu 32gb memory with 20tb traffic for ~28 euro, vat incl. This is super competitive even with DO or others.
yes, it may be bad for indiscriminate/dumb load balancing. then again this only works in the firstplace if the work units represent a somewhat equivalent and small-ish workload.

once you place value on determinism (in regards to time spent on a task) you want a tightly specced distribution mechanism and/or a feedback loop to communicate busystate back to the LB.

I have 3 servers, 2/3 don't have hardware timestamping on the interface, 1 does. Makes a huge difference when it comes to NTP.
Which hetzner server have hardware timestamping on the interface?

I'd be really interested to know, since to the best of my knowledge, they don't have PTP solutions in their datacenter.

I have two of the AX41-NVMe, and only one was lucky enough to get a "Intel Corporation I210 Gigabit Network Connection (rev 03)" which has the hardware timestamping.

In the finland datacenter, it appears there is a PTP running, though the offset is ~2.33 seconds off from NTP. Chrony says its a false-ticker, but I haven't really figured out how to get it configured correctly nor have I asked Hetzner for help. I've mostly just played around with it.

I did manage to also accidentally discover a local ISP's stratum 1's server is extremely close to me, as in a few microseconds away (I accidentally put hetzner's servers as a pool instead of a server and my NTP 'discovered' the stratum 1) ... I'm not using it, but I've thought about reaching out to them to ask if I can use it if I'm very nice.