Migrating from AWS to Hetzner Cloud: A DevOps Guide to Cost-Effective Infrastructure

Introduction 

Are you searching for a cheaper alternative to AWS or trying to figure out how to migrate from AWS to Hetzner Cloud? You’re not alone. As the demand for cost-efficient cloud infrastructure grows, more organizations are reevaluating their cloud strategies and looking into AWS vs other cheaper alternatives. One increasingly popular option is migrating from AWS to Hetzner Cloud — a move driven by the need to reduce costs, simplify operations, and maintain high performance. 

While AWS offers a wide array of services with global reach and flexible, pay-as-you-go pricing, it also introduces hidden complexities such as unpredictable billing, high data egress charges, and vendor lock-in through proprietary services. In contrast, Hetzner Cloud provides a more transparent, dedicated-resource-based pricing model, which favors organizations seeking performance consistency and cost clarity. Particularly for Europe-based teams and other cost-conscious startups, Hetzner is an attractive alternative offering flat-rate pricing, high-bandwidth allocations, and GDPR-compliant hosting. 

But switching cloud providers is never a plug-and-play task. It requires meticulous planning, a solid understanding of AWS and Hetzner architectural differences, and careful execution to avoid downtime and to maintain application performance. 

In this guide, we’ll walk you through the step-by-step AWS to Hetzner migration strategy — from initial assessment to architecture design — with real-world insights to help DevOps engineers and infrastructure professionals make confident decisions. 

Why Consider Hetzner Cloud? 

1. Cost Savings 

One of Hetzner’s biggest selling points is its dramatically lower pricing compared to AWS and Azure. If you're wondering, "Is Hetzner cheaper than AWS?" or looking for a cloud provider with transparent pricing, here’s your answer: 

Cloud Provider	Instance Type	Monthly Cost
Hetzner Cloud	CPX41	$32.70
AWS EC2	c6g.2xlarge	$226.59
Azure VM	F8	$331.42

That’s more than 6x cheaper for comparable performance. AWS and Azure use a pay-as-you-go billing model, which may appear flexible but can quickly become unpredictable, especially with hidden costs like bandwidth overages, IOPS, or regional pricing. Hetzner uses flat-rate pricing with dedicated resources, allowing for better cost control and performance predictability — a critical advantage for teams managing long-running services or fixed-budget environments. 

2. Competitive Performance 

Hetzner uses high-performance x86 CPUs that are widely compatible with existing applications. AWS, while offering Graviton (ARM-based) instances with great benchmarks, may introduce compatibility risks for some workloads. If you're looking for Hetzner Cloud performance vs AWS, check this: 

Attribute	Production	Development
AWS Instance	r5.12xlarge	r5.4xlarge
vCPUs (AWS)	48	16
Memory (AWS)	384 GB	128 GB
Hetzner Equivalent	CCX63-3	CPX51
vCPUs (Hetzner)	48	16
Memory (Hetzner)	192 GB	32 GB

Despite having lower RAM in some configurations, Hetzner delivers excellent performance due to its dedicated, bare-metal instances. These instances allocate resources exclusively to your workloads, ensuring consistent and reliable performance. Hetzner’s high-performance x86 CPUs, optimized for enterprise applications, provide a robust platform with minimal overhead, making it a strong performer for typical workloads. 

3. Regional and Compliance Advantages 

 Hetzner's data centres in Germany and Finland offer strong GDPR compliance, making it an attractive choice for European businesses. For U.S. customers, Hetzner can still be a compelling option due to its significantly lower pricing, high-performance dedicated infrastructure, and growing demand for alternative cloud strategies that reduce dependence on major U.S.-based providers. It's particularly appealing for global teams looking to optimize costs without sacrificing performance. 

4. Transparent and Predictable Billing 

Unlike AWS or Azure, which often surprise businesses with complex, usage-based billing, Hetzner offers clear flat-rate pricing. You won’t be navigating through dozens of micro-charges for IOPS, data transfers, or regional usage. For mid-sized companies managing tight budgets, predictable monthly costs are a major operational advantage. 

5. Generous Traffic Allowance and Cost-Free Internal Data Transfer 

AWS and Azure typically charge for outbound internet traffic and even internal data transfer between services. With Hetzner, each instance includes up to 20 TB of outbound traffic and free internal data transfer within the same location — a significant cost saver for teams running analytics, microservices, or file-heavy applications. 

6. Simpler Setup and Management 

Cloud platforms like AWS often require specialized staff or certifications to set up and manage services effectively. For mid-sized companies without a full-scale DevOps team, this adds cost and complexity. Hetzner's intuitive dashboard and minimal learning curve make it easier for small teams to manage their infrastructure without deep cloud expertise. 

7. Affordable Dedicated Hardware Options 

While AWS offers dedicated instances, the cost and complexity can be prohibitive. Hetzner provides dedicated bare-metal servers at much lower prices, giving businesses access to powerful compute resources for workloads like databases, machine learning, or large-scale storage — all without breaking the bank. 

Step-by-Step: Planning Your Migration 

1. Assess Business Requirements 

Start with a clear understanding of your goals especially if you're actively looking to migrate from AWS to a cheaper cloud provider: 

• Cost Efficiency: Estimate the cost differences to validate the business case. 

• Service Compatibility: Determine which services are critical and whether Hetzner supports them. 

• Performance Expectations: Define benchmarks to ensure performance isn’t sacrificed post-migration. 

2. Take Inventory of Existing Services 

You’ll want to map AWS services to Hetzner equivalents. Here's a breakdown that people commonly search when comparing cloud services: 

AWS Service	Purpose	Hetzner Equivalent	Comments
EC2	Compute	Cloud Servers / Kubernetes	Workload migration via Kubernetes
OpenSearch	Search	Self-managed OpenSearch	Deployed on Kubernetes
RDS	Managed DB	PostgreSQL (self-managed)	Use pgbouncer for connection pooling
S3	Object Storage	Retain S3 from AWS	Not Available in Hetzner - Still used for low-cost storage
Lambda	Serverless	Retain Lambda from AWS	Not Available in Hetzner - Event-driven tasks can remain in AWS
Redis	Caching	Self-managed Redis	Runs inside Kubernetes
Prometheus/Grafana	Monitoring	Self-managed	Deployed in-cluster
Loki	Logs	Self-managed Loki	For centralized log aggregation
Docker Registry	Container storage	Harbor	Managed internally
EBS/EFS	Storage	Longhorn	Kubernetes-native storage solution
Backups	B&R	Velero	Handles backup/restore for K8s
Web App	Frontend/Backend	Self-managed	Deployed in Kubernetes

If you're googling "AWS to Hetzner mapping" or "Hetzner alternatives for EC2, RDS, S3” this chart is what you need. 

3. Evaluate Hetzner-Specific Offerings 

Key aspects to review include: 

• Instance Types: Choose from CPX and CCX series based on your resource needs. 

• Kubernetes Support: Verify cluster deployment options, storage plugins (like Longhorn), and load balancers. 

• Monitoring/Logging: Prepare to self-manage tools like Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, etc. 

High-Level Architecture on Hetzner Cloud   

A typical AWS to Hetzner migration architecture include: 

• Kubernetes Cluster: Core of compute workloads 

• Harbor: Manages your container images 

• OpenSearch, Redis, PostgreSQL: All self-hosted inside the cluster 

• Longhorn: Ensures persistent volumes 

• Velero: For backups 

• Grafana + Prometheus: For performance visibility 

• Loki: Centralized log collection 

• S3 + Lambda: Retained in AWS for hybrid operations 

This hybrid approach helps balance cost savings with service reliability, leveraging the best of both clouds. 

Migration Summary 

1. Objective: 

Migrate core workloads from AWS to Hetzner to reduce operational costs while maintaining performance, security, and scalability using Kubernetes-native components. 

2. AWS: Source Components & What Stayed 

These components originated on AWS and continue to run there: 

AWS Service	Role
AWS S3	Storage for static assets, logs, or backups.
AWS VPC	Networking backbone for securely communicating with on-premises apps.
Secret Manager	Centralized secrets storage—shared across environments.
CloudWatch	Centralized logging for legacy or AWS-native resources.
AWS SQS	Decoupling via message queues for async processes.

3.  Why Keep These on AWS? 

4. Global availability and high durability of services like S3. 

5. Security: Centralized and IAM-integrated secrets management via Secret Manager. 

6. Event-driven architecture using AWS SQS that integrates smoothly with external services. 

7. Cost-benefit analysis showed it's cheaper and safer to keep these as managed services on AWS, instead of replicating them with self-managed equivalents. 

4. What Was Migrated to Hetzner (via Kubernetes)? 

️ Core application stack: 

• PostgreSQL (via Helm chart) + PgBouncer for connection pooling. 

• Backend and frontend apps containerized as Kubernetes-native microservices. 

• Infrastructure components like: 

• Harbor (Docker registry) 

• Longhorn (persistent volume storage) 

• Velero (backup and restore) 

• Ranger (Kubernetes UI) 

• Grafana + Prometheus (monitoring and observability) 

Decision Factors for Migration 

Factor	Consideration
Cost Optimization	Hetzner offers dedicated hardware with high specs at a lower price than AWS.
Performance Control	Bare-metal-like performance on Hetzner with full control of Kubernetes stack.
Security	Isolation of workloads via namespaces, network policies, and Helm-based deploys.
Operational Independence	Using open-source tools like Velero, Longhorn, and Harbor avoids vendor lock-in.
Hybrid Flexibility	Retaining some AWS services ensures global reach and reliability while cutting costs.

 Auto-Scaling in Hetzner: Achieving Elasticity with Kubernetes 

 One concern when migrating from AWS is the potential loss of cloud-native auto-scaling services like Auto Scaling Groups and AWS Fargate. While Hetzner Cloud does not provide native auto-scaling, we’ve designed our infrastructure to maintain elasticity and cost-efficiency using Kubernetes-native solutions. 

In our Hetzner deployment, we’ve implemented horizontal and vertical auto-scaling at the Kubernetes level, allowing workloads to dynamically scale based on demand: 

• Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) scales pods based on CPU/memory metrics. 

• Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) adjusts container resource limits as needed. 

• Cluster Autoscaler automatically provisions or decommissions Hetzner nodes to match resource needs — giving us near cloud-native flexibility on a more cost-effective platform. 

This Kubernetes-driven auto-scaling ensures that the infrastructure scales on-demand, just like in AWS, but with more control and significantly reduced costs. 

Our application is built on self-managed, on-premises-style cloud infrastructure, where elasticity is achieved through orchestration, not by relying on proprietary cloud features. 

Scaling Smarter: Redefining Your Infrastructure with Hetzner 

Migrating from AWS to Hetzner Cloud can be a game-changer for teams looking to cut cloud costs without sacrificing performance: 

• “Hetzner vs AWS pricing” 

• “How to migrate from AWS EC2 to Hetzner”  

• “Hetzner Cloud Kubernetes tutorial” 

• “Cost-effective cloud hosting Europe” 

 The key lies in strategic planning, thorough analysis, and effective execution. With self-managed tools and a Kubernetes-first approach, Hetzner becomes a powerful, cost-effective platform for modern applications — especially for those ready to take more control of their infrastructure.