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Posted by bumbledraven 10 hours ago

I am building a cloud(crawshaw.io)
541 points | 271 commentspage 2
zackify 9 hours ago|
That's insane funding so congrats.

Just shows I'm the Dropbox commentator. I have what exe provides on my own and am shocked by the value these abstractions provide everyone else!! One off containers on my own hardware spin up spin down run async agents, etc, tailscale auth, team can share or connect easily by name.

sixhobbits 8 hours ago|
Investment is done by relationships, belief in a future vision and team, and growth metrics like number of paying customers.

The technology itself in its current form is not valuable

isoprophlex 7 hours ago||
Sobering comment for all the little people like myself who dream of owning a business based on a vision of cool tech that just does what it promises (as opposed to all the corporate shovelware out there)
crawshaw 2 hours ago|||
Author here.

Almost every VC rejected us when we went to get seed funding for Tailscale, we knew none of them. Friends of friends of acquaintances got us meetings. Fundraising is very possible for you if you are committed to building a business. Most important thing is don't think of fundraising as the goal, it is just a tool for building a business. (And some businesses don't need VC funding to work. Some do.)

The biggest challenge is personal: do you want to build a business or do you want to work with cool tech? Sometimes those goals are aligned, but usually they are not. Threading the needle and doing both is difficult, and you always have to prioritize the business because you have to make payroll.

dgb23 7 hours ago|||
You can still do that. Not every business needs to be a hyperscaling startup.
qudat 2 hours ago||
Agreed! Over at https://pico.sh we are chugging along and having a blast. Profitable but at a scale that is manageable for us. Cheers
st-keller 9 hours ago||
Hahaha! Have fun! I‘m doing the same - together with Claude Code. Since August. With https (mTLS1.3) everywhere, because i can. Just my money, just my servers, just for me. Just for fun. And what a fun it is!
anonzzzies 8 hours ago||
Me too. I already moved our products to it and it is getting fairly robust. Guess many smaller companies got tired with the big guys asking a lot of money for things that should be cheap.
setnone 9 hours ago||
Yeah i feel like it's getting cloudy
JokerDan 3 hours ago||
I have had an eye on this for a while (found via pi.dev) but I don't really have a solid use case for it, but the idea/concept of is appealing where the price is not. I can buy a £100-150 mini-pc with better hardware to run 24/7 for my own VMs extending my homelab (granted my ISP doesn't put any restrictions on me, I know many others can't say the same).

You can see their base docker image here - https://github.com/boldsoftware/exeuntu

sroussey 8 hours ago||
> The standard price for a GB of egress from a cloud provider is 10x what you pay racking a server in a normal data center.

Oh, that’s too kind. More like 100x to 1000x. Raw bandwidth is cheap.

ac29 2 hours ago|
It was a weird point to make in the post given that exe.dev charges $0.07/GB for transfer. That's arguably worse than the major clouds, who charge about the same for egress but give you free ingress.
crawshaw 2 hours ago||
Author here.

I need to fix our transfer pricing. (In fact I'm going to go look at it now.) I set that number when we launched in December, and we were still considering building on top of AWS, so we put a conservative limit based on what wouldn't break the bank on AWS. Now that we are doing our own thing, we can be far more reasonable.

boesboes 6 hours ago||
I have mixed feelings about this concept, I agree that the way clouds work now is far from great and stronger abstractions are possible. But this article offers nothing of the sort, it just handwaves 'we solve some problem and that saves you tokens'???

Checking the current offering, it's just prepaid cloud-capacity with rather low flexibility. It's cheap though, so that is nice I guess. But does this solve anything new? Anything fly.io orso doesn't solve?

What is the new idea here? Or is it just the vibes?

gregdelhon 4 hours ago||
You should do it in Europe, so much demand for European clouds and very weak offerings.
hkpack 1 hour ago|
US company doing cloud in Europe changes nothing because of the CLOUD Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
satnhak 3 hours ago||
AWS. Months of complex dev work to build using their CDK. Terrible disk speed. Frustrating permissions systems. Tiny deployments that take 30 minutes. Rollbacks that get stuck for hours. What you end up with is about 4 CPUs and 16Gb of RAM for $1000+ per month. No wonder Bezos could send his wife and Katie Perry on a jolly into space. The world's richest man 1 IOP at a time.

For that money I can get 5 big bare metal boxes on OVH with fast SSDs, put k0s on them, fast deploy with kluctl, cloudflare tunnels for egress. Backups to a cheap S3 bucket somewhere. I'll never look at another cloud provider.

BirAdam 3 hours ago|
If you're using cloudflare tunnels, you don't even need to be on OVH. You could seriously host anywhere, like your own basement.
aayushdutt 2 hours ago||
Wondering what runtime is the infra under the hood. Firecracker? Traditional VM? Docker Containers?
crawshaw 2 hours ago|
Author here. Most of our infra is custom, the VMM is based on cloud-hypervisor (a project spiritually similar to Firecracker). We have a lot of work to do, including on the VMM, but right now there is more value for users if we spend our time on the VM management layer and GLB.
bedstefar 6 hours ago||
This looks like an excellent platform for running a "homelab" in the cloud (no, the irony is not lost on me) for lighter stuff like Readeck, Calibre-web, Immich. Maybe even Home Assistant too if we can find a way (Tailscale?) to get the mDNS/multicast traffic tunnelled.
omnimus 5 hours ago|
With pricing 100gb/8usd Immich would be wildly uneconomical. Better to wait for upcoming immich hosting to support the project or use ente.io - those are 1tb/10usd.
bedstefar 4 hours ago||
That's a good tip, thanks. What I meant to say was that there's probably at least a handful of self-hosted services you could run to offset that $20/mo.

Another one could be Bitwarden, although I don't host my own password manager personally. Or netbird. You get the point

ianpurton 9 hours ago|
I don't get it, what is this, how is it different?
szszrk 6 hours ago||
You choose a region. Then you pay for some compute size (vcpu and mem), and then you can create a lot of VMs using those limits. If some VM's don't consume all resources, others can consume it in burst.

VMs have a built-in gateway to cloud providers with a fixed url with no auth. You can top that in via the service itself. No need for your own keys.

So likely a good tool for managing AI agents. And "cloud" is a bit of a stretch, the service is very narrow.

The complete lack of more detailed description of the regions except city name makes it really only suitable for ephemeral/temporary deployments. We don't know what the datacenters are, what redundancy is in place, no backups or anything like that.

saltmate 8 hours ago||
As I understand, a cloud provider where instead of paying for each VM (with a set of resources), you pay for the resources, and can get as many VMs as you can fit on these resources.
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