[JT] Jochen Topf's Blog
Sun 2019-10-20 20:51

OSMData on Cloud Servers

Since March the OSMData Service has been running on new servers sponsored by FOSSGIS e.V. I wrote about the switch in an earlier blog post. Now, half a year later, I want to write about my experiences with the new setup.

First, the switch itself. This went without any hickups. I had expected more complaints or questions from users of the old servers, but it seems everybody found the new servers. As mentioned in my blog post from March, I disabled some products but that affected only one or two people and I had reached out to them beforehand.

My experience with the Hetzner cloud servers is somewhat mixed. Most of the time they work well and are really cheap. But there have been some problems along the line. Here is a list of pros and cons:

Pros

Cons

All in all I am reasonably happy with what I have got here, even if it took me a while to work around some of the problems with the Hetzner service. But when I am thinking about extending the OSMData service and what I need to get this done and how much the service would cost then, I am not sure whether this cloud approach is the right way to go.

OSM data is notoriously large and often needs a lot of RAM to process, so using a large dedicated server might be easier and cheaper once I do more processing. Another option I am considering is having one large dedicated server for the heavy lifting up front, everything that involves the whole planet, keeping the complete planet around and updating it, creating extracts from it, etc. And then farm out further work to cloud servers that only have to deal with smaller amounts of data. Unfortunately the Hetzner dedicated servers and the cloud servers are two different worlds, you can’t mount the cloud disks on dedicated servers for instance, so this becomes a bit more difficult.

I’d love to hear from you and your experiences with Hetzner or other providers if you are doing similar things.

Tags: openstreetmap · openstreetmapdata · osmdata